North Dallas Forty

by Peter Gent

  When Maxwell returned to the table, Hoot broke out some amyl nitrite and passed it around the table. We all sniffed deeply from the crushed capsule, then turned red and giggled insanely for several minutes. As we would start to come down Hoot would pop another capsule and the hysterics began again. Then Joanne leaped onto the table and screamed that nobody in the place, with the exception of us, was worth a shit. We had gone through a whole box when the head-waiter approached the table to tell us we would either have to stop throwing the exhausted capsules at the other patrons or leave.

  A note arrived from a long table of people at the back of the room. They requested Seth to come and join them for a drink.

  “Them folks wants ta drink with the King,” Maxwell said, his voice in that peculiar rasp. “Who am I to disappoint ’em? I’m mere mortal flesh.”

  He got to his feet and ambled unsteadily across the dance floor toward the table of people, their heads all turned expectantly in his direction. A middle-aged man at one end of the long spread stood up to greet Seth. After a brief handshake, Seth pushed by the man and climbed on top of the table. Walking the length of the table, bending down to shake hands and introduce himself as “Martha and Duane’s baby boy,” Maxwell carefully stepped his alligator boots into every open-faced steak sandwich. Some of the people laughed nervously, but most just stared in stunned silence. Seth reached the end of the table and jumped down.

  “Nice to meet ya’ll,” he said. “Ya’ll ever in Dallas you be sure ta come see me.” He hopped back to our table on one foot.

  “Now they kin tell their kids they met a star,” Maxwell laughed, plopping down in his seat and cleaning his boots of A.1. Sauce with a napkin.

  Hoot passed around a fresh amyl nitrite.

  After the discotheque we stopped at a bar close to P.J. Clarke’s. It was brightly decorated and had a live band. The customers, in costume, all stood around striking poses. The drinks cost $3.75 apiece. We ordered several rounds and finished Hoot’s amyl nitrite, throwing the used capsules at a tall fellow in a purple ruffled shirt and a plumed hat. After several rounds of drinks (I lost count after five), we walked the check, running and leaping into the limousine and roaring away.

  We ended up on the street in front of a place called Elaine’s smoking twelve paper joints rolled by a friend of Hoot’s.

  I suggested trying some rolled in Tampax wrappers, but after being rudely rebuffed by several women in our search for Tampax, we gave up.

  We headed back to the hotel around 5 A.M., dropped Joanne at the front and circled the block a couple of times before Maxwell and I stumbled out at the garage. While I said good night to the already unconscious Hoot, Maxwell sat on the curb and pulled off his alligator cowboy boots. He handed them to the driver.

  “You’re a goddam good nigger,” Maxwell said. “Don’t let nobody tell you different.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Maxwell.” The black man smiled.

  The big black car zoomed off into the dirty morning with Hoot asleep and drooling on himself in the back seat.

  We slipped through the lobby and waited in front of the elevator for the door to open. When it did, we came face to face with coach Buddy Wilks. The former All-Pro running back was propped in the corner of the elevator. He was so drunk he could not move, his unseeing eyes wide open and filled with tears.

  “Goddam fuckers,” he mumbled, his tongue thick from alcohol. “Goddam fuckers.”

  “Hey, Buddy,” Maxwell called and slapped him on the shoulder.

  The coach cocked his head and attempted to focus on the quarterback.

  “... guys hate me, don’cha?” Buddy muttered, spittle running off his lip and onto his chin.

  “Naw, Buddy,” Maxwell soothed drunkenly, his hand still on the slobbering coach’s shoulder, “we love you.”

  “... guys hate me ... jealous ... jealous fuckers.” Wilks wiped his running nose with the back of his hand. Strings of mucus stretched out from his nose as his hand fell away.

  “B.A. too ...” He slid slowly to the floor. “I’ll show ’em ... show ’em ...”

  The door opened at our floor and Seth and I staggered out. When the door closed, Buddy was lying on his side with his eyes closed.

  Saturday

  AFTER TWO RINGS, I knew Maxwell wasn’t keeping his end of the bargain and I answered the phone myself.

  “It’s ten o’clock. Good morning.” I could tell by how fast the line went dead that she hadn’t meant it.

  The other bed was empty and I remembered that sometime during that ache-filled fog called sleep Maxwell had gotten up and gone into the bathroom. I moaned slowly to my feet. My hangover had increased my normal living pains tenfold. I shuffled to the bathroom, careful to keep my head lower than my shoulders to lessen the risk of blacking out.

  I found Maxwell asleep by the commode, curled up on the bathmat and covered with towels. Blood was smeared on his lips and across his face. I despaired of standing and thumped down on the commode, holding my head. I nudged the unconscious form with my big toe, the only part of me not in terminal agony. Maxwell sat up quickly without opening his eyes. He pulled his knees to his chest and rested his head against them.

  “Aaaaaaaahh, why did I ever leave Hudspeth County?” He wiped his hands across his mouth, licking his lips and tasting the blood. His eyes blinked open and he looked at the blood on his hand. “The ol’ ulcer actin’ up,” he said.

  “Jesus, do you think so?”

  “I dunno. Anyway it’s stopped.” He looked around and tried to recognize his surroundings. He stared up at me. “Did I really eat the worm at the bottom of that bottle of mescal?”

  I nodded.

  “Aaggh.” He spat on the floor a couple of times and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I feel like I’ve lived the whole of my life in Wichita Falls.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, but from my memory of west Texas and the look of the white, blood-smeared, puffy-eyed face next to the commode, it couldn’t have been good.

  “That little man shit in my mouth again last night.”

  “Quit sleeping next to the toilet and maybe he won’t.” I held my cheeks with the palms of my hands and forced my eyes open. My eyelids felt like sandpaper. “Come on, the bus leaves at eleven.”

  We split a Dexamyl and I took a Number Four codeine. We dressed and went to have coffee. The morning toilet would have to wait until after workout.

  I loved to walk through Yankee Stadium and look at the pictures of the sports immortals on the tunnel walls—Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle. I wondered how many times they had felt as I did. Somehow, I felt closer to the greats when I was hung over.

  The stadium was a ramshackle place, but I could feel the spirits in the rotting wood and stagnant water pools. Just as the new Dallas stadium would be ultramodern to the point of perversity, Yankee Stadium was a dead place, a thing of the past.

  My locker was marked by a piece of white adhesive tape with my name written on it. Below my piece of tape was another bearing a different name, a remnant of the faded glory of last week’s contest.

  “Unitas,” I said aloud. “Imagine that. Me an’ ol’ John sharing the same locker. Only in America. Unitas one day, feathers the next.”

  “What?” John Wilson, the safety man and real estate agent, looked up from emptying his equipment bag into the next locker.

  “I’m a living example of the American Dream,” I explained. “A man who, in any other time and place would be summarily executed, is allowed to share a locker with the fabled Johnny U.”

  “Terrific,” Wilson responded, somewhat sardonically.

  “Say,” I asked him, “is your wife still pissed about the lipstick on your shorts?”

  “What do you think?” He turned the bag upside-down and shook it into the locker.

  “Tell her it’s a mark from a Red Chinese laundry.”

  He threw a football shoe at me.

  I stripped off my clothes, pulled on a supporter and a T-shirt and w
alked gingerly on the cold, damp concrete floor, back to the wooden tables near the showers. The area around the tables served as the training room.

  “Can you rub me down, Eddie?” I asked. “I was mugged last night in Central Park. It left me pretty stiff.”

  “I hope you didn’t try and run without warming up,” the trainer shot back, keeping his eyes on the ankle he was taping. “That’s a team fine.” He looked up. “Let me finish taping. I don’t wanna get analgesic all over my hands.”

  I walked back to my locker and emptied my bag into the metal cage. The workout would be short, mainly special teams, and I wasn’t on any of them. I would get rubbed and wrapped, not taped. During the special-team drills I would jog around and try to loosen up, but do no full-speed running. The practice would last no more than forty-five minutes.

  The trainer covered me with analgesic, rubbing my legs and back until I was on fire. When he finished wrapping my thighs and I had pulled on my sweats and warmup jacket, the locker room was empty.

  As I climbed out of the dugout and ran to the back rank, the team was forming up for calisthenics. Jim Johnson, the defensive coach, was lying in ambush watching for me, but I escaped the hundred-dollar fine by reaching the line before the exercises began. I returned his glare with a smile and the peace sign, and watched the veins pop out on his neck.

  Maxwell and Tony Douglas led the drills. The big linebacker boomed out the cadence in his Mississippi drawl. We finished with ten jumping jacks and started to break into groups when Jim Johnson’s marine corps drill-instructor voice halted everyone in midstride.

  “Do ’em again,” he screamed. “We’re all supposed to count cadence together. Did you count, Elliott?”

  He had me. I never counted. In fact, because of my back and legs, I was excused from most of the loosening-up drills. But I was trapped on the jumping jacks; I was supposed to do them and I was supposed to count. Counting together is good for team solidarity.

  “You found me out, Jimmy,” I said.

  “We don’t need a wise guy out here, Elliott,” B.A. interjected. “If you can’t do things with the team, get off the field.”

  I shut up and lowered my head.

  “Okay. Everybody do ’em over,” Johnson yelled. “You can thank Elliott for the extra work.”

  “Line it back up,” Maxwell hollered, shaking his head at my getting caught. Douglas glared at me.

  The ten jumping jacks were quickly dispatched, the cadence echoing loudly through the empty wooden stadium. When we broke into groups, I made a point of running past Johnson.

  “I didn’t count at all, sucker,” I whispered to him loudly. “I just moved my lips.”

  “You son of a bitch!” He threw a football at me, just missing my head. I laughed and dodged down the field.

  The practice went quickly. We were back in the locker room when B.A. announced that those who wanted to could ride the subway back to the hotel. The announcement seemed so strange that I laughed out loud. I was more surprised to find that Maxwell, Crawford, and I were the only ones to return on the bus.

  The rest of Saturday was taken up with meetings and catnaps. Maxwell took his understudy, Art Hartman, out with Hoot, saying he would return before the 11 P.M. curfew.

  Joanne slipped up to the room around six, before her date with Emmett, and we screwed. It was pleasant, but seemed to lack much of its normal carefreeness. After she left, I decided that this trip marked the end. It no longer felt quite right. I wasn’t sure why.

  At eleven the trainers came around to hand out sleeping pills and take amphetamine requests for the morning. The butterflies were already stirring from their cocoons and were beginning to flap around. I tried to call Charlotte twice but got no answer.

  I undressed, slipped into bed and studied my game plan to the sounds of the eleven o’clock news. My sideline adjustment against a roll zone was a turn in. A building was blown up in Greenwich Village. Against any shooting linebacker or safety blitz all but two of my routes automatically changed to quick down and ins. Two policemen were shot from ambush while answering a disturbance call. All wide receivers must pull up on deep routes against a three deep defense. Two plastic bombs were found in suitcases in lockers in the International Terminal at Kennedy. I closed my book and watched the weather forecast. Cloudy and cool for Sunday. Everything was in order.

  It was 11:30 P.M. and Maxwell still wasn’t back. He came in a half hour later.

  “Bed check?” he asked, stepping inside.

  “No. Not yet.”

  There was no bed check that night and we fell peacefully to sleep watching John Wayne slaughter the noble redman.

  Sunday

  MAXWELL GOT THE wake-up call after one ring. He groaned into the mouthpiece and then slammed the receiver back to its cradle.

  “What time is it?” I asked, not moving my head from the pillow.

  “Eight o’clock. Breakfast at eight-thirty, meeting at nine, nondenominational devotional at nine-thirty, Bullwinkle at ten. See, it all works out for those in the hands of the Lord.”

  Maxwell loved Bullwinkle Moose like he was kinfolks, and he worried whenever we played in a different time zone that team activity might be scheduled during “The Bullwinkle Show.”

  Seth crawled out of bed coughing and clearing great hunks of sludge from his breathing apparatus. He stumbled into the bathroom while I lay in bed and thought about my dream.

  I had dreamt that I was late for the game and the bus had left without me. I couldn’t find the stadium, although I could hear the noises of the game quite clearly. Finally I hitched a ride with Mickey Mantle, who told me Yankee Stadium was a nice place to visit, but he wouldn’t want to live there. He dropped me at the stadium and disappeared. I started down the tunnel to the dressing rooms. The winding passages got very dark and I began to have difficulty keeping my eyes open. There were rats and spiders everywhere, but I could only glimpse them. Everything was dark and blurry. I kept running into giant spider webs, knocking hairy yellow-and-black spiders onto the back of my neck.

  Then suddenly I was naked and standing in the dugout. The stadium was full and the game was in progress. I could see Rufus Brown, our clubhouse attendant, waving me to the other side of the field. He had my equipment and uniform. I started across the field and got caught up in the game. I was still naked. Maxwell threw me a pass but I wouldn’t take my hands from covering myself. I was agonizingly embarrassed. The ball bounced off my face, breaking my nose. I could breathe again. I ground my jaw so hard from frustration and fear that all my teeth broke off. Then the tape around my thigh unwound and my leg fell off. I had the ball and I was crawling naked toward the end zone, still trying to hide by hugging my stomach to the ground. Then B.A. took me out of the game and told me to quit fooling around and made me sit alone on the bench. I was still naked and my nose was bleeding. Everyone was looking at me... .

  “Come on, poot,” Maxwell said, toweling off his freshly shaven face.

  I jumped quickly out of bed and pulled on my pants.

  “B.A. said we could wear turtlenecks, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but no love beads.” He held one arm crooked over his head as he rolled on copious amounts of deodorant. It seemed peculiar, in light of the day’s schedule.

  The bulletin in the elevator listed Empire Rooms I and II as the locations for our meeting, pregame breakfast, and devotional. The rooms would also be used for much of the simple ankle and knee taping.

  “MMMM ... there’s a delicious smell,” I said, lifting my nose and following it to the entrance of Empire I. “Eggs and analgesic. Just like Momma used to make.”

  I stopped at the doorway and checked out the tables set for breakfast. Most of the team was seated, waiting for the food.

  Maxwell brushed past me into the room, singing. It was his favorite George Jones song.

  “... a man come round today and said he’d haul my things away,

  If I didn’t get my payment made by ten ...”

 
; I stood in the entrance and surveyed the two rooms, waiting for Maxwell to choose what table he would grace while he took his pregame coffee and cigarettes. It was an important part of his game plan to choose the right table at which to smoke and drink coffee, tell jokes, and generally pump up the frightened men around him. The players he selected each Sunday were picked according to criteria known only to himself. We often split up at pregame meals because of my unpopularity with some of the men Maxwell chose.

  The partition between I and II had been pushed back and the six breakfast tables were crowded into the front of Empire I. Near the partition several players in shirt sleeves and undershorts waited their turns to be taped.

  My stomach began to churn as the endocrine glands redistributed vital juices for the coming contest. I yawned and stretched, suddenly feeling very tired, the first sign of nervous fear.

  In Empire II, chairs, a blackboard, and B.A.’s ever-present portable podium were set up for the last-minute strategy review and the nondenominational team devotional.

  Maxwell sat down with Jo Bob Williams, Tony Douglas, O.W. Meadows, and a couple of others. I walked to the nearest table and joined several blacks, including Delma Huddle and the wayward running back Thomas Richardson.

  “Hey, Bubba,” Huddle said, holding out his palm to be slapped. I obliged and the cold wetness of our palms made a soggy pop.

  He was wearing a white silk shirt monogrammed on the cuff, a wide green tie, a light green cashmere coat, and boxer shorts. No shoes. No pants.

  “Hey, man,” he yelled at a rookie waiting by the partition for his turn to be taped. “I’m in front of you and don’t let nobody in. Get me?” The rookie waved and nodded.

  “How you feeling?” I asked Huddle, as I stood behind him to knead the muscles at the base of his neck. “Ready?”

  “Yeah, Bubba. How ’bout you?” He reached back and tried to grab my balls. I jumped and he roared his high-pitched bursting laugh.

  “I was ready there for a minute,” I said, brushing my hand across the top of his woolly head and sitting down. My knee banged against a table leg and water spilled out of one of the metal pitchers.