The Legend of Jesse Smoke

by Robert Bausch

  “Well, they sure did a good job then,” I said. “Making her into a woman.”

  “Level with me here, Skip. Have you ever had sex with her?”

  “Of course not,” I snapped, offended at the question.

  “You know anyone who has?”

  “I don’t know. She may have dated a few of the players at first. You’d have to ask them.”

  “This is getting to be more trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “The very day the Canadians identify her in court—the very day!—she refuses to testify.” Flores was wearing a gray suit, a dark brown scarf around his neck, no overcoat. When we got outside, the frosty wind sent his hair flying. “We managed to get a recess until this morning at ten a.m.” He kept brushing his hair back with his hand as we walked to where his limousine waited for us. “You get her to that courtroom today, you hear me? She’s going to answer these charges.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  When we were seated in the leather backseat of his car, he said, “This could be our whole season, Skip. You got that? We’ll lose her for good if this lawsuit is allowed to go on. So just—do something.”

  “Sir, we’ll win the Super Bowl with Jesse or without.”

  He could see I didn’t believe it.

  “But we’ll get her back,” I said.

  “You better. Or both you and Engram’ll be hunting down some new jobs.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Is that a promise?” I said

  Again, he withdrew into himself. He was sitting right next to me in the backseat of that huge limousine, but it was like he took his mind and went somewhere else. I was just sitting with this well-dressed, intrepid mannequin.

  It was a little past eight in the morning when we got to the Ritz Carlton, where Jesse was staying. I had one hour to talk her into testifying, and if she didn’t show up then, Judge Lorenzo could declare her officially in contempt of court or simply rule that the case could go on and extend the temporary restraining order.

  I left Flores in the lobby. On the ride from the airport the new day had emerged more fully; it was a clear, bright morning, the sky blue and fresh looking, the air shifty and cold. I thought it might be a good idea to get Jesse out of the hotel, take a walk maybe. But when I got to her room, I realized she wasn’t prepared to go anywhere. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt as always, but her hair was flat and dirty looking and her face had a wrung-out look to it—as though she’d trekked a great distance without water.

  “You all right?” I said, as she backed away from the door.

  “Sure. Come on in.”

  I was glad to find Liz sitting in a comfy chair next to the television. She was sipping some sort of fruit drink. She looked up and smiled when she saw me.

  “What’s going on?” I took a seat on a chair by a desk in the room. Jesse sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I guess I’m done with all of it,” Jesse said.

  Her mother gave a loud, exasperated sigh. “Talk to her. Would you?”

  “You’re not done, Jesse,” I said. “You’re too good.”

  “No?” she looked at me. For the first time I saw defeat in her eyes.

  “Jesse,” I said. “I don’t care if you’re a man, or you used to be man, or if you’re planning on being a man. None of that matters to me.” She smiled a little but said nothing. “It doesn’t matter to anybody else on this team either, okay? We just want you to continue playing for us.”

  “I don’t have her birth certificate,” Liz said. “But I brought a video of when she was a little girl, throwing and kicking the ball. I can walk into that courtroom tomorrow and—”

  “You have a video of her?”

  “At nine years old, when she won the Punt, Pass, and Kick competition. In two categories. She doesn’t want to use it.”

  “I’m not going to show them that film. It’s irrelevant. And it’s humiliating, dredging up my little kiddie films.”

  “How on earth could it be irrelevant?”

  “It just is.”

  “I’d sure like to see it,” I said.

  “I knew something like this would happen,” Jesse said. “I just … I just wanted to get through this season before it did.”

  “We haven’t lost yet.”

  “That video of you,” Liz said. “It proves—”

  “It proves nothing, Mother.” There was no softness in the way Jesse said this, but at the sound of the word “Mother,” Liz could not hold back a little smile of satisfaction.

  “The tape is irrelevant,” Jesse went on. “It doesn’t matter what’s on it.”

  “Except, how could you be this fellow Ibraham if your mother testifies with the video and proves you’ve always been a girl?”

  “The tape’s irrelevant,” Jesse said again. “So is my mother’s testimony.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I’m not a man and I never was a man,” she said. “But, let’s put it this way—I know who Robert Ibraham is.”

  That stopped me cold. Liz and I both looked at each other and almost in unison said, “You do?”

  And then Jesse met my gaze with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. They were almost gray with sadness. “I lied to you about him.”

  My mind reeled a moment. “Well, who is he?”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “How much trouble would I be in if I—if I …” She stopped. I waited. She took a deep breath, then she said, “I am. I’m Robert Ibraham.”

  It didn’t register with me at first, what she was saying. I thought at first she was confessing to the whole thing. There was a long pause where none of us seemed to be looking at anyone. Then I said, “So … you were a man once?”

  “I pretended to be a man. It was the only way I could play football.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. Liz, eyes wide in amazement, just stared at her.

  “I used the name of a guy who really did play college football. Robert Abraham took over my father’s team in Guam when— Anyway, he was the coach there when I left and … I didn’t think he’d mind if I used his name. I changed the spelling to Ibraham.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “I just thought—I just thought, you know, I might fool everybody and get to play. And maybe when they saw me play I’d … Only then I had to leave. Right after I signed that contract, one of the players— See, I had a fake ID with Ibraham’s name on it and my picture. I was so scared all the time, I finally broke down and told one of the other players on the team. He convinced me I’d never get away with it.”

  “That was Nate?” I said.

  She nodded. “How’d you know?”

  “Just a guess.”

  “He was a backup tight end.”

  I started to laugh.

  “How much trouble am I in?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, still laughing. “Kinda funny, though, isn’t it? And ironic to boot. I mean, here they are, trying to prove that you’re this man, and that you’ve had this operation and all, and you—you … Do you see how funny that is?”

  “I guess.” She clearly didn’t.

  “I’m surprised this isn’t killing you.”

  “Glad you’re having fun.” Now she did laugh a bit.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’ll blow this town before the end of the day. I don’t think they have a case.”

  “But then … haven’t I committed fraud?”

  “Jesse,” I said. “There’s not a damn thing that’s fraudulent about you. You’re the genuine article. You’re about the most genuine article there is in the world. It’s the rest of us—the league, the media, the players and coaches, hell the whole damned world—that’s guilty of fraudulent behavior.”

  “What do you mean?” Liz asked.

  I turned to her. “The bullshit that gender means a damn thing. That women are the weaker sex and need to be coddled and protected. Because, all along, right under everybody’s nose, it’s pretty clear, isn’t it?�
�which gender has had to be coddled and protected …”

  “You got that right,” Liz said.

  “To tell the truth,” I said, “we are all of us—from the moment we’re born until the minute we die—pretty well and truly in the shit.” I laughed a bit more, and then I said, “You and I are going to court right now, Jess. Okay?”

  She gave me a sad smile as she nodded yes.

  Thirty-Eight

  “Court” turned out to be a large, rather plush conference room in the judge’s chambers. But there was a big table in there and we all sat around it—our people on one side and the plaintiffs on the other. I was not surprised to see Corey Ambrose there, as a representative of the players’ union. I couldn’t even look at him. The commissioner sat directly across from Edgar Flores, and next to him was the attorney for the Montreal Alouettes—a very gray, jowly faced old man with wire-framed glasses, named (and I’m not kidding) Crook, who kept making notes on a legal pad in front of him. The head of the players’ union was a former offensive lineman named (improbably) Judy Harold. The guy was still in great shape, his sports jacket bulging in the upper arms and chest, and to his credit, he seemed ashamed to be there. Next to him was the players’ union lawyer, a lean, snakelike fellow named Zabriskie who was constantly rubbing his hands together on the table in front of him. On our side were Charley Duncan, Ben Frail, Edgar Flores, Jesse, and me. Jesse had changed her clothes and brushed her hair, but she still looked a little washed out. She was clearly tired and oddly pensive. She didn’t see the thing as I saw it.

  Judge Lorenzo sat at the head of the table. A great tall window loomed behind him and sent angled beams of light over his shoulder and across the table. He looked like a deity preparing to establish justice. He was dressed in a gray business suit with a black bow tie. He wore gold cufflinks and a gold ring on his pinky finger, and like his attire, he was all business.

  Across from the judge, at the other end of the room, was a disk projector and whiteboard screen and next to that a table and chair for witnesses. Enormous blue curtains surrounded the windows on both sides and the curtains behind the screen were closed. Apparently they had already watched a lot of the film on previous days, but the whole apparatus was still there for our side.

  Ben Frail, too, had laughed when we told him the full story that morning, but the humor of the situation did not distract him from what he saw as certain real legal problems remaining. Jesse’s integrity was going to be on trial now and he didn’t want any of us to forget that.

  The first thing Frail did, with Jesse’s permission, was show the Punt, Pass, and Kick footage. Then he asked me to tell Jesse’s story. I did so, fighting laughter the whole time.

  Lorenzo did not laugh. In fact, when I got to the part about Jesse pretending to be Robert Ibraham, he leaned forward and gave her what can only be described as a scathing look. But he said nothing. Then Frail brought up the issue of the contract with the Alouettes, and Judge Lorenzo interrupted him. “You’ve already presented your case on that counselor.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. But I wanted to address this new issue, as regards the original contract.”

  Lorenzo nodded. “Go ahead, but I won’t take it kindly if you waste any of our time here.”

  “All I wanted to say was, even though Ms. Smoke was pretending to be a man, no damage pursued from her deception.”

  Judge Lorenzo said to Jesse, “How did you get through the physical exam?”

  She looked at me first, which only would have told her that I wanted to know that myself.

  “A friend,” she said, quietly. I’d never heard her voice sound so timid.

  “Speak up,” Lorenzo said.

  And suddenly, she was Jesse again. She sat straight up and looked at him directly. “The Alouettes did not have a full-time team doctor, Your Honor. They had a nurse. She gave me a physical and then promised not to tell anyone. Far as I know, she kept her promise.”

  Zabriskie, the players’ union lawyer, said he had a question for Jesse.

  “Go ahead,” Judge Lorenzo said.

  “Did you pay this nurse anything to keep quiet?”

  “No. Like I said, she was a friend.”

  “You knew her beforehand?” Zabriskie said.

  “No.”

  “She just became a friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like that.”

  “She was a woman,” Jesse said, as if that explained something.

  “And she did this for you, even though it meant she might be fired.”

  Jesse shrugged. “I knew I could trust her. She seemed to like the idea, actually. Said she hoped I could make it work.”

  “And how did you know you could trust her?” Zabriskie said. “Was this some sort of fellowship of the womb?”

  “Like men don’t have their own good ol’ boy networks?” Jesse snapped.

  Judge Lorenzo leaned back in his chair. “Point well taken.”

  “Your Honor,” Frail said, “I think the contract the Alouettes gave Jesse to sign should not be at issue. She never deceived them once she signed it. She did not play. She accepted no money. In what way, then, is it a valid contract that bears any level of scrutiny?”

  “And I said: We’ve been over that.”

  “She signed it,” Zabriskie said. “The Alouettes have a signed contract.”

  “No money changed hands,” said Frail.

  Judge Lorenzo looked at Jesse. “Did you expect you could dress in the locker room? That somehow none of the other players would see you? How on earth did you imagine you’d get away with it?”

  “Well, I came to see I couldn’t,” she said. “That’s why I just—that’s why I left the team.”

  Judge Lorenzo shook his head in what seemed like wonder. “Remarkable,” he said.

  Crook, the Alouettes’ lawyer, said, “You still signed a contract to play for two years with—”

  “I don’t want to hear any more about that contract,” Judge Lorenzo said, sharply.

  “Your Honor,” Frail said. “I only want to make it clear that the contract Ms. Smoke signed with the Alouettes—”

  “The one she fraudulently signed as Robert Ibraham,” Zabriskie said.

  Frail ignored him. “I just don’t think it would be fair for them to make an issue of this new information, since that contract was never fulfilled, regardless of whose name was on it.”

  Lorenzo said nothing, but he nodded in agreement. I realized what Frail was up to. He wanted to limit any damage that might accrue from Jesse’s original dishonesty—which is how the Alouettes characterized it. I was a little worried about what the league would do about it. More than any other sports league—or even any other corporation for that matter—the NFL monitors and disciplines players for off-the-field behavior. Regular drug testing is only the tip of the iceberg. If you’re going to work for the NFL, you’d better have a spotless history, no question. They would not like what Jesse had done. Our only hope was that it would be overlooked because of the special circumstances. At best, we hoped the league wouldn’t discipline her until next year.

  Now Frail began to present our side of things concerning the integrity of the game. According to Charley Duncan his questions and reactions all week to the allegations of the other side had been brief, to the point, and sharply defined. So he didn’t have much to say. But the video he put on spoke for itself.

  First, he showed players seeming to pull up as they approached Jesse—using many of the exact same plays that the other side had used as their evidence—only he let the film run a bit longer now, to show that one of the things they were pulling up from was an oncoming block from one of our behemoths on the offensive line, or from Walter Mickens, who could flatten just about any player he wanted to. Several of the players who had claimed to “pull up” got flattened.

  Then, using a split-screen technique, Frail showed those same players against Ken Spivey and Corey Ambrose—in films not only from this year but also from the previous one. (Th
is was something Charley Duncan arranged that I wasn’t even aware of.) On each play, the players in question looked exactly the same. Frail paused several of the clips at the same moment and showed that each time a player claimed he had “pulled up,” his motion was not pulling up at all, but in fact bracing for a hit, or jockeying for better position on the quarterback.

  Finally the film went to the hits Jesse herself had taken, including that first one that bruised her back, knocked her helmet off, and resulted in a touchdown for the other side. All the evidence was there. Frail presented a chart that showed roughing the passer penalties against the Redskins were roughly equivalent to the rest of the league. He showed film of each one of those penalties and pointed out how each infraction occurred.

  Looking over at Charley Duncan, I gave a thumbs-up. Much as the guy always irritated me, I had to admit, that video was a masterpiece. I’d given him literally hundreds of hours of film—virtually every passing play Jesse was involved in, not to mention Spivey and Ambrose—and he and Harold Moody had edited the thing perfectly, and added some of their own. Working through the night, they had put it all together, and then they presented it to the lawyers in New York so they could prepare to manipulate it to the best advantage.

  When we were done, the folks on the other side of the table visibly started to squirm. Judge Lorenzo said he wanted to hear from Jesse.

  “Yes, Your Honor?” Jesse said.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  She looked across the table. “Well, to the players’ union, I don’t have anything to say,” she said. “Maybe they have something to say to me. To the Alouettes, though, I do apologize.”

  “You think you could have gotten a chance to try out if you’d just admitted you were a woman?” Lorenzo asked.