Life Among Giants

by Bill Roorbach

  I prepped for the game in my usual way, all but superstitious: Sunday paper, huge carbo breakfast with the other quarterbacks over the playbook, stretches alone or with a trainer, a long walk during free time down to the harbor, the cries of gulls, the stench of low-tide mud, then over to the stadium, full game-day stretches, playbook review with the offensive coordinator, playbook review with the defensive coordinator, more playbook review on my own, two coffees, whirlpool, pads, quick snack of peanut butter and jelly, team meeting, more peanut butter and jelly. I kneeled for the team prayer—something I usually skipped—and forgot Kate, felt only the genius of the coaches, how all of our energy had been beautifully orchestrated through the practice week, culminating as we sprinted out onto the field in juggernaut formation, the long weekly climb to the top of the mountain together, great vistas before us. This was a late-season game, a chance to clinch both the division and conference titles at home, playoffs in sight.

  Garo kicked three field goals, all in the east end zone, as it happened, and so I got to perform for my sister, no different than I’d felt in peewee league, no different than in high school, receive the hike, set it up, boom. After the plays I’d find her up there in the cheering throng, always chatting, chatting with whomever was beside her, behind her, on the bench in front. It was a very close game all the way through to the last minutes, when we found ourselves three points behind, fourth down on the one-yard line, routine field goal to tie, only a couple minutes left to play.

  Coach Shula called a B-ninety, and after that it was all poker faces, the B-ninety being a fake field goal we’d practiced endlessly but seldom attempted in a game. Four times, in fact. On three occasions I’d made the yard we needed, on the fourth (my very first season), I’d burst through for a touchdown. That touchdown ran through my head vividly. And in my head I saw myself making another, and saw Katy leaping to her feet, we win! Very simple: you take the hike as always, Garo fakes a kick as you pull the ball away, then you stand and run left behind the entire team blocking, only thirty-six inches progress required, an arm’s-length, a touchdown in all our heads, careful body language: this is only a kick, see you in overtime. With his call Coach Shula had put all of his faith in me, all the team’s faith, all the fans’ faith, just as he said he would. Get that touchdown and we go to the playoffs. Fail, and the long road continues for everyone.

  And so in a light Florida mist, very muggy afternoon, Garo took his preparatory three steps left, his one step right, kicked the dirt just as he always did, raised his arm just as always, dropped it fast. The snap was perfect, a spiral right into my hands. And as Garo rushed past me to block all comers I straightened the ball, poked it tip down into the grass and held it for the kick that wasn’t going to come. By the time I realized my lapse—football a mental game, all right—I was already under a great pile of defenders, and the game was lost.

  CHICK JOHNSSON LET me know that the Miami Dolphins would pay for any kind of therapist I wanted, at any price, gave me a list of people specializing in sports, offered to make the call for me. And over the subsequent months I saw hypnotists, art therapists, two psychiatrists, a Chinese herbs guy, an osteopath renowned for mystical cures, finally a smart psychotherapist, the first guy I ever heard mention the phrase post-traumatic shock. He just let me talk, and let me cry, and I believe it was he who recommended bodywork, as he called it, believing (as the osteopath had) that the body stored disaster. So to the acupuncturist, the masseuse, the chiropractor, the witch with the wax candles and incense. Maybe they were only doses of love.

  One willowy bodywork expert pulled at my arms—so good—pulled at my head, passed her long hands an inch over my flesh smoothing my energy fields (or something along those lines—I never quite got the explanation). She pulled at my legs, she pulled at my toes, my ten fingers, my ears, wonderful, rousing, always the gentle scent of almond oil. Her hair was very long and dyed deep black to contrast her very pale skin, pale blue eyes, and in them a pained wisdom, a wayward whiff of judgment, too. She put her hands on you the moment you entered her inner sanctum, touched you even as you pulled off your shirt, even undid your belt and drew it through its loops as you lay back on her table, like preparing for sex. So it seemed natural one humid July afternoon when she crossed the line I’d been unconsciously pushing at and started kissing my belly (which at the time was like armor, but with nerve endings). She was unapologetic, very straightforward and natural, kissing my belly and then my chest and my neck and my face, some new treatment, you’d think from her demeanor, which was serious and really quite professional, hard to explain. She bid me rise and kissed the rest of me thoroughly, too, down to my toes and then back up, turning me this way and that to be sure that every stretch of my skin had felt her lips. Under her kimono she was only herself, and had always said giving was as therapeutic as getting, so I kissed her as she had kissed me. We made love on a pile of her plush towels and meditation cushions without rearranging them, using the office as it was, she reminded me, not as we wished it would be, the next patient eyeing me carefully as I floated out through the waiting room.

  BENEDIKTA PEKKILAK CRABTREE. Her business card said B. Crabtree. Finnish by heritage, and though she was taller and thinner and less robust and more conventionally pretty, something about her reminded me of Sylphide, a certain emotional remove, an even more northern chill. Benedikta was distant in another important way in that she was married (to Crabtree), and happily, if an unfaithful kind of happiness is not too hard to understand, and in the end I guess I didn’t mind that she had an “existing condition,” as she referred to her husband. Her long-view unavailability made her possible for me, she liked to say. I saw her for months and then years, near daily appointments in the off-season, as many as possible in fall, one of her prime two-hour slots in the late afternoon. She was free for occasional chats over breakfast but for sex only at my appointment times. And it was never only sex, but all the other elements of bodywork, the stuff that formed her regular practice, never quite tender.

  Benedikta was my library, a new book in my hands every week, poetry and novels, politics and science, cultural criticism and a certain kind of hopeful memoir, also a lot of biographies of great men, since she worried I had no role model past the age my father had died, which was forty-four and coming at me swiftly, not that I realized it then. She wanted me to re-create my philosophy courses at Princeton for her, and I did what I could, boxes of books, assignments, oral exams, Heidegger, Alcibiades, Kant (“Out of the crooked timber of man no straight thing has ever been made”).

  Because another part of her healing protocol was talk.

  The third part was touch, which we had down, spending whole hours gauging the sensations of one instep upon another, one hand placed on a buttock, etc. From this sort of thing she reached her climaxes, which were thoroughgoing, very long, a kind of ratcheting and clenching of her limbs, ratcheting and clenching under my touch, my tongue; and then release, often sobs.

  The fourth, overarching part of her protocol was the not-touch, amazing, a definite sense of strange powers as she stroked and patted the air over my face, or kidney, say, or calf.

  I all but fell in love with her, getting to be a pattern, the closest I’d gotten since high school to that kind of plunge. And she all but fell in love with me, a pattern, yes. The shallowness of her gaze was no character flaw but was the inexplicable Crabtree, standing in my way. As for me, I was not receptive to her deepest love, so she told me. Something blocked me, something that had to do with my parents and their deaths, she thought, and not with Sylphide, as I always tried to claim, and not with Emily, my backup position, though Benedikta was correct when she observed (her hand just over the nape of my neck) that somehow I’d managed to tangle my memories of those four people in a hopeless knot. Kate was the answer, she thought. Though not in a way she could articulate, just something she could feel when her hands hovered in the air over my heart, hot flawed prescience: “You have a twin.”

  We often
ended our sessions angrily, frostily. We were at least that close. Once, writing out the usual check (one hundred ten dollars was a lot, late seventies!), I called her a prostitute. She drew herself up, all her tiny-breasted naked pride, all her black-hair-swinging-lank pride, and with her face untouched by any emotion but her customary honesty, said, “You only say that because you pay me.”

  After that for a month or two I campaigned for her divorce from Crabtree, for us to marry. “Your aura isn’t evolved enough for a soul merger,” she said, her one kind of joke. But seriously, even with the benefit of her teachings and other ministrations, she didn’t think I’d make it to her level in this life. Her husband was much more thoroughly enlightened, she let it be known, bitter tones as we made love on her worktable. “It’s just that he doesn’t turn me on.”

  “That doesn’t seem so enlightened,” I breathed.

  We were this close, both of us, holding on to the edge of orgasm, something she’d taught me, could easily go on for hours.

  Lying across me another afternoon, she let her black hair cover and uncover my face and very, very slowly said, “You say Kate collected oddballs. You make her out to be mysterious. But you seem to collect oddballs, too, or make all your people into oddballs. Anyway you go on and on about all your people and their extraordinary lives and extraordinary qualities, everyone so beautiful. Probably you even make me seem strange and beautiful when you talk about me, yes? The more beautiful, the more wonderful, the more elegant, the more I think you’re covering up your own sort of ordinary and mundane grief. Which it’s time to abandon.”

  Later, I got dressed and wrote her a check.

  I DIDN’T GET up to Connecticut at all in the weeks and months after Kate’s visit. Jack kept the breezy letters coming for a while, the weekly phone calls, but the next fall they slowed, then stopped. It occurred to me to call him, to check in, but I did not, even knowing what must be happening. We played in New York—I didn’t call. We played in Boston—I did not. Even Philadelphia. How far is that? An easy train ride.

  So it wasn’t a shock when an anonymous someone sent a small New Haven Register clipping via the front office: Kate had driven the newest of Jack’s Volvos down a boat ramp at some park east of New Haven and straight out into Long Island Sound—the car floated twenty minutes before she got a window open—then, help not arriving, she swam nearly a mile to New Haven, climbing out of the icy water near the summer theater down there, her illness like a furnace to keep her warm. Dripping and naked, she traipsed all the way through the city to her old residence hall, where she was found calmly sitting in her former entranceway, found and gathered in by several kind young Yale women offering blankets and towels.

  Jack had asked for help, and I hadn’t come through. Guilt’s alchemy left me feeling nothing but fury, fury at Kate, fury at whomever had sent the news item, fury at the girls of Yale, fury at the huge new mattress stuffed into my bedroom (five-hundred-dollar sheets), fury even at Jack, who was blameless. He’d used his connections and modest wealth and probably every ounce of his pride and gotten my sister placed in a great in-patient program in Boston.

  MY NEXT DINNER with Coach and the owners was postponed, postponed, and then never mentioned again. The official interest in my family and my personal life faded. Coach Shula didn’t have me up to the office. No more hands on the shoulders. No more confidence building. No more queries after my happiness. The season went on, ten wins, four losses, not bad but no playoff berth, which, of course, eleven and three would have brought. I suited up with the rest, disconnected from them. The months passed, the off-season unfolded, winter in Florida, spring, a lot of rain.

  Then, in summer training camp, Bob Griese tore ligaments in his knee. Don Strock took over as the season opened, which meant I was second in line, called on to run a play or two in nearly every game of 1978 and 1979, full quarters in eight games in those seasons, successful quarters, too, including my patented brand of head-on touchdown runs, slowly erasing the memory of my lapse. By 1980 Bob Griese’s injuries had taken their toll. Career effectively over, he stepped off the team and toward the Hall of Fame and a stellar career as a sportscaster. Anyway, I saw an opening in the forest where the tree had come down, raced toward the sunlight, saw myself succeeding Strock, who couldn’t go on forever.

  But in the next year’s draft the team picked up a new phenom, LSU helmsman David Woodley. He and Strock alternated starts from his first game: soon the fans were calling them Woodstrock. Strock didn’t last long, just as everyone had predicted, and 1982 was my big year, second behind Woodley, a lot of action, scraps of fame, full respect, dinners with Coach, Woodley fading, once again the light ahead of me. But in 1983 Dan Marino came on board, and he’d prove to be one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of the game.

  9

  Around that time, Carter Jeffries and Lionel Smith let it be known that they were looking to open an upscale soul-food restaurant in the old city, part of a revitalization scheme the city council of Miami had cooked up, all kinds of tax breaks and rent incentives, an endless flow of cruise-ship customers by contract, not to mention a home base for Carter’s flashy party scene. They only needed a little more money and someone to take the reins—a minor financial partner who’d take a major managerial role. They’d be the famous football players, the public face of the place; all that was needed was some poor sap to run the place, or make that a rich sap. I wasn’t tempted.

  But then one night in the middle of the season I sat up in the enormous bed Kate had bought, her silk sheets rustling, her down comforter sliding to the floor.

  Why not?

  It wasn’t like my last years with the Dolphins were going to keep me very busy, and on my new month-to-month contract (including humiliating pay cut), who knew when the end would come, except soon? My experience cooking with Honey had touched something in me, real pleasure in the handling and transformation of food. Carter just laughed when I told him all that after team meeting one Monday, showing those famous gold inlays. “I suppose she made you Black, too!”

  I knew nothing about restaurants, even less about business, and nothing about soul food, true, but none of that mattered, or so I argued: all of that stuff could be learned. With me they’d have a tall and memorable presence in the house, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer himself, still Miami’s tenth most eligible bachelor.

  OUR TIMING WAS excellent, as it turned out, downtown enjoying a resurgence, and soul food a long turn as the fad of the moment. Our enterprise, called Soul Train, was a bustling success from opening night forward. Carter signed autographs and hosted big, free-for-all sports discussions at the bar. Lionel acted as dining-room manager, seating his adoring fans, sprinting out dinners in front of the wait staff, a lot of fun for everyone.

  But within a few months of constant crush, the flaws in the restaurant came clear: the kitchen set-up was clumsy, the head chef a nasty lush, the wait staff quirky in a bad way. Two reviewers called the menu stereotypical. One went so far as to say our food was “coarse, gross, loaded with sugar and fat and salt and starch, mistaking volume for quality, fine enough food for the defensive line, maybe.”

  Ouch.

  Business began to fall off.

  Carter knew a real chef, one Etienne LaRoque, an old college acquaintance of his. We flew him in from Mobile, where he ran a health-food kitchen of some kind, not very promising. Carter had warned us about all the tattoos—didn’t matter, I was shocked anyway. The guy was covered, even his scalp, even his face, the Virgin Mary benevolent on his forehead, her soulful eyes gazing out over his own.

  At Carter’s seaside mansion, in his private kitchen, Etienne prepared meals for us through two long days. He was a whirlwind, from the butcher’s shop to the fish dock to the farm sheds to Carter’s kitchen.

  “So it’s soul food,” the interviewee said, first lunch.

  “Soul food sure enough,” said Carter.

  Dish by dish it came out, a perfectly timed progression: red beans and ric
e and fresh pickles and cornbread and actual chitterlings and thick pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy, collard greens with pig’s feet, sweet potato pie with a ginger-pecan crust. We’d brought in our best waiter and the poor guy shuttled back and forth to the pool and the beach with tastes all afternoon, Etienne alone in the kitchen making dinner for twenty but sending out little leek tarts and strange squid sticks and samples of sweet teas, kale-pesto corn fritters, knuckle-jelly “caviar,” an endless stream of riffs on our theme, more and more formal as we came off the beach and dressed and our guests began to arrive: four teammates (more than half a ton in aggregate), also their very lovely wives (barely a quarter ton), also Miami mayor Hector Hernandez and his toothy daughters, also three local chefs we’d gotten to know, also special guests of my own: Benedikta and her husband, the redoubtable Crabtree, not the first time I’d met him, but the first time I’d ever seen her at night. Out of her office she seemed tall and severe, less glamorous despite the dressing up, not the woman I knew.

  I helped the waiter serve a potato-and-fatback soup, taking my tastes when I could, unbelievably clean and flavorful given the humble ingredients. Crabtree, a guy who liked to talk, had the mayor’s ear, a guy who didn’t like to listen. Benedikta closely monitored their conversation. She wanted to bring spiritual healing to government, muttered the appropriate chants under her breath. I hoped she was impressed with me. Etienne had meanwhile gone Cajun, blackening thick cuts from redfish filets (this is before that prep was well known), smoke like a forest fire filling the kitchen, sudden, thrilling food emerging from the conflagration, actual applause when Etienne came out to see what we thought. During the first wine break (Etienne’s small-plate pairings, a peppery ceviche with a surprising French blush, Vietnamese stuffed baby cabbages with a Malbec of all things, then seven fresh salsas with seven fast whites to put to a vote, then—what?—a flight of miniature knishes and blinis with three Polish noodle soups, very small servings, quick visits in his spotless apron for commentary, shots of vodka.