“I am infatuated,” she said. “Come to Kenwood. I live with a family in a huge house there, you’ll love it.”
“Oh, I’m too plain for the city,” he said. “I came down here in a trucker’s lunchbox by mistake, and I can’t wait to get back to the woods.”
“I love you!” she cried. “Let’s breed!” They crouched together, breathing hard on each other. He mounted her in blind happiness and they made love and squeaked for pleasure.
“You will love it here!” she said. “I can’t wait to show you around.”
“I like the country,” he said. “I have a burrow in the granary, with a warm bed of corn husks and all the oats I can eat! You should come and see it.”
“Sure. For the weekend sometime.”
“The silage is especially good this year,” he said.
“May I be frank?” she said. “Mice aren’t supposed to live in the dirt, eating leaves. The city is the place. Great food, shows—you can wallow in luxury to your heart’s content. Why live like moles?”
They headed down into a Hennepin Avenue sewer and found the uptown pipe and grabbed an empty milk carton and rode a wave up to Kenwood, bumping and swaying in the flow of muck, and hopped out and squeezed through a crack and climbed up a crevice and soon were in the wall of a large old house, looking into the dining room, where the remains of a major dinner party littered the table. Platters of cheese, grapes as big as their heads, rolls, wine, brandy, scraps from a rack of lamb—they scampered up the table and dug in—
“Try the lamb,” she said. “Fabulous with Dijon.”
But before he reached the lamb platter, there was a deafening screech and a clatter of dishes and a cat with flaming yellow eyes was right on top of them! Mesa Bob and Annie leaped screaming from the table and hit the floor running, the cat’s breath at their backs, and they tore into the hole just as the cat skidded into the wall. They lay on their backs, panting, trembling, weeping, having escaped death by a tenth of an inch.
Finally the country mouse whispered, “How can you live like this? Traveling in sewers, eating dinner with death hovering nearby—at least in the country, we’re safe.”
“It’s not the city you hate, it’s me, isn’t it!” she cried bitterly. “You’re dissatisfied with me. Well, to hell with you. I’ll raise the children myself.”
“No. You’re great, I love you,” he said. “But Minneapolis is such a dark place.”
“Life is a dark place. I’m sorry. Cats are a menace. But let’s live. Time for dessert,” she said. “Smell the cheese? It must be nearby. Stilton, if I’m not mistaken.” She crept into the dark and around the corner. “It’s near here,” she said. “I can smell it. Beautiful.”
“Be careful, darling,” he whispered, and then he heard the sharp snap of the trap and the thud of metal on flesh.
“Annie?” he called. “Annie.”
There was no reply, of course. His lady love was dead, her neck broken, her glassy eyes aimed at a chunk of cheese she would never eat.
Mesa Bob returned to the north woods in a sack of mail and resumed his life in a peaceful burrow, his heart filled with black grief. He had loved her, and she had been all wrong for him, and now she was gone, and there would never be anyone else. Silage, acorns—nothing tasted good anymore.
The local mice lacked Annie’s glamour, her dash, her sense of the moment. He missed her every day. Life is short for a mouse, and he needed to breed, and yet he never could forget his lost love.
He took to drinking and running around late at night, and whooping and yelling, and of course it was only a matter of time until he went too far.
He was raising hell and tearing around, and felt a whoosh of wings overhead as the owl took him in her talons and flapped and up he went. It hurt for one split second and then he felt as numb as a piece of wood. The ground fell away beneath Mesa Bob, his burrow and his silage and his warm bed soon were far behind, and he was too stunned to feel even the slightest bit of loss or regret.
CASEY AT THE BAT (ROAD GAME)
t was looking rather hopeful for our Dustburg team that day:
We were leading Mudville four to two with an inning left to play.
We got Cooney on a grounder and Muldoon on the same,
Two down, none on, top of the ninth—we thought we’d won the game.
Mudville was despairing, and we grinned and cheered and clapped.
It looked like after all these years our losing string had snapped.
And we only wished that Casey, the big fat ugly lout, Could be the patsy who would make the final, shameful out.
Oh how we hated Casey, he was a blot upon the game.
Every dog in Dustburg barked at the mention of his name.
A bully and a braggart, a cretin and a swine—
If Casey came to bat, we’d stick it where the moon don’t shine!
Two out and up came Flynn to bat, with Jimmy Blake on deck,
And the former was a loser and the latter was a wreck;
Though the game was in the bag, the Dustburg fans were hurt
To think that Casey would not come and get his just desert.
But Flynn he got a single, a most unlikely sight,
And Blake swung like a lady but he parked it deep to right,
And when the dust had lifted, and fickle fate had beckoned,
There was Flynn on third base and Jimmy safe at second.
Then from every Dustburg throat, there rose a lusty cry:
“Bring up the slimy greaseball and let him stand and die.
Throw the mighty slider and let him hear it whiz
And let him hit a pop-up like the pansy that he is.”
There was pride in Casey’s visage as he strode onto the grass,
There was scorn in his demeanor as he calmly scratched his ass.
Ten thousand people booed him when he stepped into the box,
And they made the sound of farting when he bent to fix his socks.
And now the fabled slider came spinning toward the mitt,
And Casey watched it sliding and he did not go for it.
And the umpire jerked his arm like he was hauling down the sun,
And his cry rang from the box seats to the bleachers: Stee-rike One!
Ten thousand Dustburg partisans raised such a mighty cheer,
The pigeons in the rafters crapped and ruined all the beer.
“You filthy ignorant rotten bastard slimy son of a bitch,”
We screamed at mighty Casey, and then came the second pitch.
It was our hero’s fastball, it came across the plate,
And according to the radar, it was going ninety-eight.
And according to the umpire, it came in straight and true,
And the cry rang from the toilets to the bullpen: Stee-rike Two.
Ten thousand Dustburg fans arose in joyful loud derision
To question Casey’s salary, his manhood, and his vision.
Then while the Dustburg pitcher put the resin on the ball,
Ten thousand people hooted to think of Casey’s fall.
Oh the fury in his visage as he spat tobacco juice
And heard the little children screaming violent abuse.
He knocked the dirt from off his spikes, reached down and eased his pants—
“What’s the matter? Did ya lose ’em?” cried a lady in the stands.
And then the Dustburg pitcher stood majestic on the hill,
And leaned in toward the plate, and then the crowd was still,
And he went into his windup, and he kicked, and let it go,
And then the air was shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.
He swung so hard his hair fell off and he toppled in disgrace
And the Dustburg catcher held the ball and the crowd tore up the place,
With Casey prostrate in the dirt amid the screams and jeers
We threw wieners down at him and other souvenirs.
We pounded on the dugout roof as they helpe
d him to the bench,
Then we ran out to the parking lot and got a monkey wrench
And found the Mudville bus and took the lug nuts off the tires,
And attached some firecrackers to the alternator wires.
We rubbed the doors and windows with a special kind of cheese
That smells like something died from an intestinal disease.
Old Casey took his sweet time, but we were glad to wait
And we showered him with garbage as the team came out the gate.
So happy were the Dustburg fans that grand and glorious day,
It took a dozen cops to help poor Casey get away,
But we grabbed hold of the bumpers and we rocked him to and fro
And he cursed us from inside the bus, and gosh, we loved it so!
Oh sometimes in America the sun is shining bright,
Life is joyful sometimes, and all the world seems right,
But there is no joy in Dustburg, no joy so pure and sweet
As when the mighty Casey fell, demolished, at our feet.
HERB JOHNSON, THE GOD OF CANTON
alent is a kind of wealth, and if you find it under your pillow one morning, you are as surprised as anybody else. One fall day when I was twelve, I picked up a football and ran with it, crazy-legs style, across the backyards of Canton, Indiana, jumping bushes, running circles around my older brothers, and when I was sixteen and started getting my growth, I eluded everyone. I was 165 pounds and big across the shoulders. I became the star halfback and captain of the Trojans. I was All-State. I was, I think it safe to say, regarded as a god, Young Herb the Boy Wonder and Bringer of Good Things, the Hero Who Vanquished Our Deadly Enemy Forest Park, and as a sign of the town’s devotion was given my choice of young women and selected Elayne, a beautiful blonde with the prettiest breasts in a hundred miles. I got to hold Elayne’s breasts every Friday night after the game. They were perfect to a high degree, small and pointed and lively, and she was charmed by them herself. “Nice, aren’t they,” she said, looking down. Elayne became an economist and today those breasts live in Washington, D.C., and go to work at the General Accounting Office.
Football was like a long sunny afternoon for the most part. My body did the work, my head sat on top and looked down in amazement, the maroon-and-gray silk uniform with the numeral 27 and my feet finding the hole before it opened, other guys grunting and cursing and crying out in pain and horror and happy me waltzing toward daylight, the linebackers lunging a moment too late, then freedom, the wide-open expanse of grass to gallop over and the secondary defenders backpedaling, panic in their eyes. I scored more touchdowns than anybody in the history of education. I was a healthy young horse, and everybody in Canton did me favors; people I hardly met were very good to me, such as my physics teacher, Mr. Foresman. He gave me a B even though I didn’t understand physics at all. “Herby,” he said, “you know more about physics than anybody, you just don’t know that you know it. You are physics, Herb.”
We lost to Gridley my senior year, a terrible shock to my system. Gridley was the best homosexual football team in Indiana, or so we kept telling them across the scrimmage line. They beat us 19–14. They had a little fairy field-goal kicker from Mexico, a tiny greaseball with long black hair and big lips and a thin mustache. “Hey, Pedro sweetheart, kiss me,” we called to him and made smacking sounds, and he kicked four field goals from way out around the thirty-five-yard line, four big boomers that sank our ship. We slunk away astonished to the locker room and hid in there for two hours.
I attended Indiana State on a scholarship, and Myra Jordan was the coach there. She was twenty-seven, tall, blonde, tough as nails. I’d drop a pass in practice and she’d look at me in disgust and shake her ponytail and say, “Johnson, get your fat ass down on the ground and do me a hundred push-ups while I think of what else I can do TO GET YOUR ATTENTION, BUTTHEAD.”
I loved that woman. I would’ve done anything for her. My freshman season, I was All-Conference, and my sophomore year, I set a season-scoring record—206 points in twelve games. First game of junior year, I was tackled from behind by a 200-lb. buffalo and tore ligaments in my right knee and sat out two games and then, against our archrival, Kentucky, she asked me to go in for the last play of the game.
We had the ball on their fourteen-yard line, fourth down, two seconds left, Kentucky leading 20–14.
“Herby,” she said, her arm around my shoulders as forty-eight thousand Indiana fans sat praying to their God in the big stadium, the afternoon shadows lengthening across the field, “I want you to go out there and take the ball over right tackle and into the end zone. Think you can do it?”
I told her I could do it.
“If you do it, I’ll marry you,” she said.
I told her I was going to do it.
“I’ll marry you and have your babies,” she said. “I’m a wonderful lover, Herby, and I believe I can make you very, very happy. And I bake.”
I told her I was going to do it.
“Think you can do it, angel?” she asked. “Think of me taking off all my clothes and lying on top of you and kissing your chest. Think you can do it?”
I told her that I knew I could do it.
I took the ball over right tackle and cut left and cut right and on the second cut my right knee came half out of its socket and then I cut left and felt a wave of pure pain wash through me and as I ran for the end-zone corner each stride sounded like a man chewing peanuts. In those fourteen yards, the cartilage and ligaments were shredded into tiny chips that surgeons are still finding today, and I flung myself across the line just as two tacklers hit me in that knee. They almost tore it from my body, and in some respects life would have been easier for me if they had.
It’s been thirty years of bum knee, five operations, physical therapy accomplishing nothing, painful sessions with a chiropractor, and after all these years, my leg throbs with pain when I get out of bed in the morning, pain when I walk, pain if I swing a golf club too hard. I have not run since that October afternoon in Kentucky thirty years ago. It’s been all I can do sometimes to place one foot in front of the other, especially as I put on the weight. You quit football, you tend to bulk up.
Myra and I had four girls, and she was right, she is a wonderful lover. But with my knee, even that was painful sometimes. But I love her as I did when she was the coach and made me do push-ups. I would crawl through a minefield for that woman.
Three years ago I received the Icarus Award from the Disabled American Football Foundation banquet at the Canton Regency Hotel, an award that goes to “a man who heroically exceeded the limits of his ability and fell, wounded, to the earth, a hero who can never fly again.” I was introduced by the local TV weatherman, Tommy (“Twenty Percent”) Patterson, who said, “I’m going to say just two words to you people right now, and those two words are: Herb Johnson.” They stood and clapped, maybe hoping to see me shed a tear of overwhelmment, but I refused to. I told the banquet: “I don’t regret it one bit. I ran fourteen yards with a broken leg and the pain is still vivid to me but at the end of those fourteen yards I found my wife, my love, the mother of my babies. Life’s greatest treasure is love, gentlemen. Some guys suffer all their lives and never find it. I suffered for fourteen yards and found love that lasted thirty years. So don’t feel sorry for me, boys. I AM THE LUCKIEST MAN ALIVE.”
They stood and clapped for three minutes. “Love it! Love the humility!” cried Twenty Percent. “Don’t you? That’s humility talking! Humility is what that is! All the great ones have it. Humility. And you know something? I love it!” They clapped again. They would have carried me away on their shoulders, except that I then weighed 490 pounds.
My doctor says my knee problem is worse because of my weight, and I’m sure he’s right, yet food is a comfort to a man in pain and Myra is a good cook. Recovering from my operations, I lay in bed and ate her gorgeous omelets for breakfast, the kind that conceal six eggs and a quarter-pound of cheese, and then half a ch
icken for lunch with the crispy skin I love so much, and a sixteen-ounce flank steak and baked potato and banana-cream pie for dinner, and a few weeks later, when I hauled myself out of bed, Myra would let out my trousers.
“I like a big man,” she would whisper in my ear at night, and when the lights went out, I felt like I was 165 again. We’d sport around and get excited, and she’d be moaning and groaning and scratching and squeezing, and I was suddenly, briefly, a god again. Ob you darling Myra. My light and my treasure.
Then in the morning, I’d drop my pajamas and see myself in the mirror and be horrified to see how far things had gone and think, Here I stand, I can eat no more. I would poke a finger in my face in the mirror: “Weight must be lost, Herb. No more ribs, no more burgers. Total burgerlessness. Carrots and celery. Miso soup, bok choy. Asian-lady food. Dry toast. Tea. Fruit. You let this continue and you will soon be wearing XXXL shirts, shirts like tents, and not tucking them in, going around in that shirttails-out look that says, Here come de fat man.”
But the fat man kept coming. He could not be stopped. From 490 three years ago, I gorged myself to new levels of obesity, a man with a butt like a Percheron and a garbage-bag gut and three chins that go wibble-wibble-wibble when the fat man chuckles, which I always do—fat guys aren’t allowed to be sad, it depresses people, we have to go hohohohoho all the time or folks don’t care to be with us.
People would come to our house for dinner and I rose from the couch, a whale in a vast blue satin shirt and pants with an eighty-inch waist, I laughed heartily and hugged my beautiful slender daughters and rolled my eyes and chuckled and hooted and cackled, I’d sit down and whack away the calories, put down three plate-loads and toss back a dozen rolls, chomp a couple desserts, and the guests said good-night with a big grin and a glance at my gut and said, “Herb, I don’t know what your secret is, but you’re the happiest man I know. God bless you, Herb.” And I would haul myself upstairs and sit in the can and lock the door and cry.
The Book of Guys Page 16