—You hate trips where you don’t have people to see.
—Yeah.
—That’s why we are taking the most unscenic route in America.
We go through the main street of Seymour, Mike’s Pit Barbecue and Sonic and Maverick’s Café and the Movie Gallery and a discount food store that closed down. A Ford pickup carrying cattle slogs in the opposite direction. A little bit out of town, we pass a Chevy Trailblazer, then a Chevy pickup with six-packs of beer and soda in the back covered in plastic. Then nothing but the dry gulch of the tarmac.
—You want to drive cross-country again?
—Noooo. . . .
—Why not?
—Because I’ll be tired after this one.
—You’ll never want to do it again?
—NO.
For all my dismissiveness, there is something mesmerizing about these lands. Just as so much of America is being submerged by the homogenization of new waves of overdevelopment, there is also the vast America that remains untouched. It reinforces the promise of America, a country capable of greatness because it is physically still great, still new frontiers.
VI
We reach the outskirts of Odessa at 7:15 P.M. We stop at the Flying J Travel Plaza where Zach buys a map of Midland-Odessa. There are several to choose from, and he carefully studies them all before making his selection. The Flying J sells personalized mini license plates. I remember when we bought Gerry and Zach ones for their bikes when we lived here. I remember the outfits they wore in this newfound land, blue jeans and those red cowboy boots and flannel shirts and black cowboy hats. I was following the legendary high school football team the Permian Panthers for the 1988 season, then the winningest team in Texas state history. I remember when Sarah took the twins to the last game of the regular season in their pajamas.
I remember the freedom I felt in Odessa, away from the newsroom hothouse of the competitive Philadelphia Inquirer where we all sat starving for attention. I knew nothing about writing a book. But I knew I was onto the best story of my life almost from the minute I arrived in Odessa in July of 1988. The Permian coaches and I took off to Houston for the Texas North-South all-star game. The trip was long, about 430 miles, so we spent the night in a motel where the head coach got a single room with two double beds. There was a traveling party of seven, and I am not sure but I think I slept in the double bed that contained only three of us, although one of them was large. Very large. And he snored. Loudly. Very loudly.
I stayed in a motel off the interstate when we got to Houston. It cost $129 for the week and truckers were all over it. I understood why when I turned on the television and several channels showed deeply serious porn, making it a nice place to unwind after watching the monotony of practice. During the all-star game itself, an official left the field complaining of a stomach ailment, then came back on and dropped dead. It understandably took more than a few minutes to remove his body from the field. There was the requisite shock, but after a while one of the coaches began to mutter under his breath, “Let’s get on with it here.”
They did.
I knew it was going to be a story unlike any I had ever encountered.
It only built from there—the injury to Boobie in which he tore his anterior cruciate ligament and you knew his life had changed in the freak millisecond of his cleats getting caught in the turf in the twilight. Added to the book were the ingredients of the open racism, the surreal travel of the football team to away games on chartered jets, more money spent on athletic tape than on new books for the English department.
Friday Night Lights went on to sell close to two million copies. It became the film, then ultimately a long-running TV show. It was the story I was destined to write like every writer has a story he or she is destined to write, the one you have inside you because you only really have one inside you. I knew when it was published I would never top it no matter how hard I tried, and after almost twenty years, I still have not topped it. It all happened when I was thirty-five. The success opened all sorts of avenues, but it also hung over me. It was a wonderful thing to be known for something that had lasted for so long. It was a terrible thing to be known for something that had happened so long ago. It sounds like self-pity, but it wasn’t self-pity. It was the fear of being tapped out and topped out, the rest of my life a vain search.
As we drive into the outskirts of Odessa, we go by places that once thrilled me because of their rawness but now only haunt me. The back lots selling rigs and horse-head pumps and water trucks and jangles of pipe and compressors; the shabby mud-colored motels where men with dirty fingernails and thick boots pay seventy-five dollars a week while they work the oil fields, the downtown where you could still see the faded embers of the J. C. Penney’s sign and the one for Odessa Pawn pockmarked with bullet holes. I had never seen anything like Odessa, stitched together without any planning but in rise and fall to the oil bust or the oil boom. It had the dazzle of discovery for me, a third-world country. But that was then.
Zach senses this without my saying a word to him.
—Do you think we’ll ever go again to Odessa after this?
—I don’t think we will.
—Why?
—I just don’t think we will. You’ll get older. I’ll get older. It will be harder to get to.
—Do you like being in Odessa?
—Sure I do.
He knows I am lying. It is why he asked me the question.
The deeper we drive into town, the more his enthusiasm unleashes. He squeals when he sees the Raindance Car Wash. He does the same with the Dairy Queen over on 7th. And the pond in front of the YMCA where he and Gerry fed the ducks. And the nursing home where he visited Olivia and Mary, calmly noting they aren’t around anymore because they are dead. And the house we lived in on Richmond, which of course he finds without a map. I try to feign enjoyment, but too many memories are jamming me. I hope this will not be a replay of Milwaukee. I must also come to terms with the most difficult relationship I have ever experienced outside of my own family.
12. Boobie
I
BOOBIE MILES LIVES in Midland now with Evelyn, his girlfriend of the moment. She is steady and of even temperament, a low-burning flame on the stove. I believe that, at this point, Boobie has four children with three different women. It may be more. It’s been hard to keep track over the years. I don’t know how many will be living with him when we see him. It may just be his newest child, Evan. His beautiful twins, James and Jasmine, a flurry of keyed-up energy with the call of “Daddy” like seagulls, could be there as well. He loves his children. He has tried to be a good father despite his nomadic existence, from Odessa to Midland to Monahans to Dallas and then back again.
Zach is curious about Boobie. He is determined to understand. It is confusing to him why I give money to someone who is not a part of our family.
—What does he need money for?
—Because he doesn’t have a very good job. Life is hard for him sometimes.
—What do you mean life is hard for him sometimes what’s hard for his life sometimes?
—It’s just hard. He has a lot of kids to support. And he gets down on his luck and he doesn’t have a very good job.
—Yeah.
—He’s kind of like a fourth son to me.
—Yeah.
—I worry about him.
—Yeah.
I hope a special bond kindles between the two of them. I hope that Zach will understand the role that Boobie has played in my life and embrace him, drawing on the gifts of intuition I never fully appreciated until this trip.
—You know when people like you and when they don’t?
—Yeah.
—You do have a sixth sense about the sincerity of others. As Tony Chavez says, “The thing with Zach is that you always know he is telling the truth.”
—Oh.
—Do you know what sincerity means?
—No what does it mean?
—It means that you kno
w in people who is honest and will never hurt you.
—Oh.
I wonder how Boobie will be, whether he will ever make the remotest peace with what happened to him years ago. I know the answer. We all face it, that moment of clarity in which you realize you will never be what you imagined. He faced it at eighteen as a senior in high school when he ruined his knee as a running back. He had dreams of playing college football and then pro. He had a right to those dreams as much as any athlete does, although they are false dreams 99.9 percent of the time. But, God, was he good. Most kids in high school, however impressive their statistics, are still gangly when they run. They rely on speed. Boobie had speed (he ran the hundred-yard dash in 10.3 seconds). And he ran his two-hundred-pound body like a man. Whatever the reality, the dreams of what could have been still consume him.
When the movie Friday Night Lights was being made, there was a measure of redemption for Boobie if you could call it that. He was cast in a small role. When he went to Ratliff Stadium in Odessa for the filming of a scene, hundreds of locals in the stands as extras gave him a standing ovation. They did it to prove that they were not the racists who called him a “big dumb ole nigger” when he was in high school and joked about how, like a horse that had pulled up lame at the track, he might as well put a bullet in his brain. Boobie succumbed to the measure of celebrity he gained that night. You could see the glow and beatific smile of someone who was something again. He said it felt like he had been given the senior season that had been stolen from him. He did interviews. He met all the actors. They acted like they liked him. They’re actors.
Before long, Hollywood packed up its gear and left. Billy Bob Thornton went back to his band. Tim McGraw went back to Faith Hill. Boobie’s character in the movie, played by Derek Luke, was its linchpin, and the film couldn’t depict Boobie without acquiring his “life rights.” I had helped obtain the life rights of the key kids in the book in the early 1990s for one hundred dollars up front and a thousand in total if the film was made. I acted as the conduit after it was made clear the film would never go forward without my obtaining them. I was young and desperately wanted the film to be made. I felt enormous pressure not to come back empty-handed; I was told this was the only offer, and either the kids took it or the movie disappeared. It was the first of my experiences with Hollywood, and I had yet to learn that when it comes to so-called non-talent—everyone but the actors themselves—everything was a degree of conceit and manipulation.
I met with the kids at a Mexican restaurant and extolled the virtues of signing the agreement, how exciting it would be to have your life up there on the silver screen. I knew I was acting as instructed by the producers. I still felt filthy and loathsome, but that didn’t stop me.
Mike Winchell, who was the quarterback in the book, listened without a word and did not sign. He rejected the emphatic pitch because he wasn’t sure he wanted his life depicted. He waited until the film was about to be made and got a much better deal: I was a decade wiser at that point and told him to ignore the studio’s lies that they could make the film without his rights. I told him to hold out. At least he got in the low five figures. But he also got what he really wanted—a new set of golf clubs.
Boobie didn’t originally sign either. He wanted to be in the film if it was ever made, but he also knew he was the essential character and deserved more than a hundred bucks on signing. I frantically made a side deal with him for three thousand up front and ten thousand in total out of my pocket if the movie was given the green light. He still should have gotten more. I thought that the tragedy of his plight would ignite the humanity of at least one of the battalion of producers, and promises were made to supplement what Boobie had already received, which as far as they knew was a lousy thousand dollars anyway since they had no awareness of the side deal. Those promises were forgotten as soon as they were made. I gave him the ten grand for the film to honor my commitment. I had given him thousands already in response to his calls for help. He used the movie money to enter into a strange financial arrangement with his girlfriend at the time to buy a daycare center in the empty, echoing town of Kermit, near Odessa. The daycare center went bust, and the money disappeared.
He was broke again. But his celebrity post-movie still had some mileage left in it. He was recognized at the local Holiday Inn. People came up to ask if they could have their picture taken with him. It was the same at the Permian Mall where he was stopped for autographs. It was like being in a glass-bottom boat. Boobie may not have seen it but everyone else did, the sand and muck of the bottom.
Still, in the wake of the film, a few people in Odessa were affected by his story. They wanted to help and offered him jobs. The jobs were menial, but they meant a steady wage and benefits. They called me, and I vouched for him. He had a beautiful smile and a deep-throated laugh and he could be a “gentle giant” as Tony Chavez called him. At first he had to walk to work, about five miles. Then he said he needed a bike so I bought him a bike. He said he had a bead on a car that cost only a couple of grand, so I gave him a couple of grand for a car. He stopped showing up for work. They had no choice but to fire him. He became basically penniless. He still had child support payments in every corner of Texas. He still got stopped for autographs in the mall. He still got hit with a spate of paternity suits by women he hadn’t heard from in fifteen years because they presumed the combination of the movie and book had made him rich. What came to him over the years came from my own pocket. Sixty thousand. Seventy thousand. Maybe a little bit more.
For as long as I knew him, I don’t think he ever had a driver’s license or car insurance. He was repeatedly arrested for his failure to carry such documents. He’d call from jail and say, “Hey!” like a long-lost cousin. He’d say, “What’s going on!” and I knew exactly what was going on: he needed bail. After one release, he said he had finally zeroed in on something that he knew he could do and would last. He wanted to become an air-conditioning and refrigeration technician. He reasoned that most people in the summer would always need air conditioning. He seemed sincere. It meant going to a place called the Career Training Institute in Huntsville, Alabama. “They’ll even pay my airline ticket!” he gushed. They fucking should have: the tuition for roughly one month of training was $11,900.
He had to take out a loan but he needed someone to cosign. I did not research it. I did not think about it. The money requested was ridiculous without the guarantee of a job. Yet I kept hoping that this would be the thing that would stick. I should have said no. I couldn’t say no. I didn’t say no.
He flew to Huntsville and e-mailed me the results of a rudimentary test on which he had scored a 100. He circled it with an exclamation point. He was trying to prove he was serious, and I think in his own way he was serious. After the course ended, he disappeared. The institute called me and said they had referrals for him for possible jobs but didn’t know how to get in touch with him. I told them I didn’t know where he was either. Like the Fugitive he was always on the run, not because of outstanding warrants (although he had a few of those) but because he never had a place to stay for longer than a few months. He used the kindness of friends and girlfriends and cousins and grandmothers. Sometimes he got a place for himself, but inevitably the bills piled up, and there were only so many times I could pay the rent and utility bills. He ended up at least once at a homeless shelter. The phone numbers he gave me lasted at best for a few months, some for a few weeks or even days. Over the years I had collected three dozen numbers for Boobie.
The bills from the Career Training Institute tracked me closely, the loan ballooning to $12,317 at an interest rate of 10.5 percent. On the days when I wished I was not a writer, and the older I got there were too many of those days, I wished I had opened a career training institute charging 10.5 percent on tuition loans. I finally paid the debt off. I didn’t tell Lisa until the whole thing was over. She wasn’t livid but incredulous at how naive I was. She said I had no one to blame but myself. I told her that Boobie nee
ded help, and guiding him toward a career was constructive. She agreed, but she told me that paying over twelve thousand dollars for something I had never even bothered to research wasn’t helping anybody. It was wasted money for both Boobie and my family. She said if we really wanted to help Boobie, he should move in with us in Philadelphia. She was right.
So when Zach turns to me now with puzzlement and asks me why I give Boobie money, the answers I give him are truthiness at best. I tell him that Boobie needs it because of that hard life. I say that I am doing it for Boobie, but I wonder if I am really doing it for myself—expiating the guilt I amassed from witnessing his treatment in high school like a football animal. But all writers silently soak up despair for our own advantage; like dogs rolling in the guts of dead animals, the stink of others makes us giddy. We deny it but we lie in denying it. Without Boobie Miles, Friday Night Lights would have disappeared. I know that. So maybe I was paying him off.
II
Zach and I stop first on the main street in Odessa before heading to Midland to see Boobie. When I was contemplating doing the book, the street is one of the sights that hooked me. I have never tired of the time warp of it. It has not changed an inch, as far as I can tell. There is the closed-down movie theater with the name “Ector” in vertical letters of white on red like a streak of tears. The honky-tonk pawnshops like a roaming carnival sideshow selling guns and microwaves and rows of wedding rings like pulled molars. The red stoplight swinging to no one in the wind. I leave the car to take some pictures. Zach stays inside. By accident, I have left my tape recorder in the record mode in the car, and I listen later that night.
I hear him breathe a husky breath. I hear a whisper rise to a rasp. I hear him say, “Stay! Stay!” I hear him folding and unfolding his map in a steady rustle. I hear him humming. I hear a sigh. I hear a singsong voice saying, “Just Dave a question!” I hear a staccato hum. I hear him say, “He’s doing a story on Dave!” I hear him take a gulping inhale. I hear furious chatter. I hear a low murmur. I hear a desperate inhale. I hear high-pitched laughter. I hear enough. For all that I have seen of my son that is so uplifting, disabilities remain and in some aspects are only getting worse, particularly these raging debates with himself. They scare me, and yet he has shown remarkable discipline in restraining himself in my presence during the trip. His war of words is a compulsion. I have compulsions as well. I try to control them but often cannot. He does a much better job than I do.
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