Rebel

by Nick Nolte

  CHAPTER 5

  Football

  FOOTBALL WAS MY WORLD. THERE WAS NEVER A PLAN B. In high school, it was hard to imagine how anything else might ever seem equally worth my time, hard work, and devotion. So far the poo-poo prank hadn’t seemed to affect my high school career, as I had grown bigger and taller, been well coached for the first few years of high school, and by now was a quarterback. I loved running the offense, loved the challenge and responsibility the position demanded, and it seemed certain that I would have a stellar senior year leading the Benson High School Mighty Bunnies on the gridiron. We were going to be very good, and my final high school football season would lead to many opportunities to play college ball, I was sure.

  But then one sweltering day in July as summer practice got under way, I tried to open the locker-room door and found it locked. I banged on it loud enough that head coach Rhees Jeffries finally came to the door and told me I couldn’t come in. When I asked why, he said, “Well, the guys are holding a vote on whether you are even going to be asked back on the team.” Then he shut the door and locked it again.

  When I got home and told my sister, Nancy, she agreed with me that we had to find out what was going on. The whole thing seemed insane. We headed out and found my friend and teammate J. P. Smith, and he was uncomfortable as hell when we approached him.

  The coach had pressured everybody on the team to take a vote, he explained, and he’d made it clear that he expected a unanimous show of hands—the coach wanted me gone. “You know, what could we do? What choice did we have?” J. P. said as he turned away, and I was dumbfounded. According to J. P.—who had to know precisely what had occurred in the locker room—I would no longer be the team’s starting quarterback, I wouldn’t be anyone’s backup, wouldn’t sit on the bench, wouldn’t practice. I was done and that was that, and it was devastating news, far worse than if I’d heard that I had been kicked out of school. School didn’t matter; it was football that was my education.

  Yet before I could ask anything else, J. P.’s defensiveness turned to anger and he added, “You want to fight, motherfucker? I’ll fight you.”

  I said, “No, I don’t want to fight, J. P.,” and I turned and walked toward our car. But if I was mystified, Nancy, who was home from college for the summer, was pissed, and she shouted, “I’ll fight you, you motherfucker!”

  But I cautioned her, “No, Nancy. You do not want to fight him. I’ve watched this guy. He’s got reach on you, and if you fight him, he’ll pick your face apart. You do not want to fight J. P.”

  “No, fuck him!” she insisted. “I’ll fight him.”

  But I managed to get her to back down, and we drove away and went home. The following morning, I got up and was getting ready to head for school when my mom asked where I was going. I told her I wanted to get to school to see what else I could find out. What was the vote about? Why had there been a vote in the first place? What in the hell had I done?

  “Okay,” Mom said, “but we’re moving today. I guess you’ll have to figure out where to find us and catch up with us.”

  “Moving? Where are we moving to?” This didn’t make any sense at all.

  “We’re moving to Westside. Out to West Omaha.” Then she added, as if all kinds of things had been in the works since the afternoon before, “You’ll be ineligible for two games and then you’ll be eligible for the final eight.”

  What she meant, I instantly understood, was that I’d be ineligible to play on the Westside High School football team for its first two games, but then I’d be on the team. I didn’t know how in the world this had all been considered and decided and set in motion overnight, nor how my parents had decided to move only on my account, but apparently, they had even found a new house in the hours since the coach had told me I was cooked.

  “Well, I guess I should pack,” I said, understanding almost nothing but buoyed by the support and my parents’ very quick reaction to this bizarre turn of events.

  “That’s what I’d do,” Mom offered, and that was it, and we packed up and went up to Westside.

  IT WAS A LONG TIME BEFORE I FOUND OUT WHAT HAD HAPPENED at Benson, before I learned the truth that my expulsion from the football team had nothing to do with the kind of quarterback I was and nothing to do with anything I might have done off the field. One of the rumors was that I had dug holes and hid beer before practice and then got caught drinking it during a practice session. In my own mind, I’d wondered whether putting shit on the bed springs at Bud Wilkinson’s football camp a few years before had finally caught up with me, but that seemed wildly improbable, and far more unlikely than what I discovered was the simple truth.

  Coach Jeffries wanted me off the team because I was a much better player than the backup quarterback, a kid named Joshua Darley. Yet he wanted Josh to be his starter and play every down because he was having a quiet little affair with Josh’s mother. The dean of students at Benson was Josh’s father, and that worked in the coach’s favor, too, never mind the fact that Josh wasn’t as big as me or as tall or as much of an athlete as I was.

  The whole deal was more than a little incestuous; it was political as hell, and I was the fall guy. I wasn’t an important student in the way that Josh Darley was—at least I wasn’t important to the coach the way Josh was. As soon as he heard the news that I had been voted off the goddamn team, my dad had gone to Coach Jeffries for an explanation. But Dad didn’t like the coach’s answers to his several questions, and I know the cowardly coach must have claimed that the matter was out of his hands—my teammates wanted me off the team, he surely maintained, and what else could he do but support their wishes?

  Dad was far bigger than Coach Jeffries, and he could have crushed him, but instead he simply walked out of his office, went to the bank, and borrowed the down payment he and my mother would need for a new house, found an acceptable tract home over in the Westside district that we could just barely afford, and bought it. Problem solved.

  That was the kind of man my father was. In addition to being physically imposing, he had a very palpable, quiet strength that often unsettled people. He didn’t make threats and virtually never raised his voice, and the only time he ever truly got mad, according to Mom, was at a party at their friends the Maguires’, when, without saying a word in warning, he broke the jaw of a man who was flirting with her.

  Dad chose not to put a big hurt on Coach Jeffries that day, and I wasn’t surprised. High school ball in 1950s Nebraska was almost as big as anything could be, and the coaches at big-city schools like Benson were virtual kings. My father must have known this misuse of power wouldn’t be questioned by the community, so he and my mother took us to a new one.

  Dad had been a football star at Iowa State, and he knew the game extraordinarily well. I’m sure he loved to watch me play; he seldom missed our practices or games, yet he never talked about my technique or offered me tips or reminisced about his own high school days. We played different positions, for one thing—his big size, even while he was still a kid, had almost assured that he would become a lineman, and he was a good one. But more than that, I know he wanted me to learn by doing—by playing the game—and he didn’t want me to be burdened with trying to live up to his past accomplishments or his hopes for my own.

  He wanted me to learn for myself that football is about solving sudden dilemmas, about learning how and when to react, about choosing in only a millisecond the best option among many dozens. Even though I was much more like my mother than him in most ways, I think we both knew in those days that we shared a passion for the way in which football requires body and mind in equal measure, a passion for the way in which it demands passion.

  WESTSIDE HIGH WAS A FANTASTIC CHANGE. MIRACULOUSLY the coaches, my teammates, and my fellow students found it easier to accept me as I was than people in Benson had. I was the new kid in school, of course, but I thrived. I remained disinterested in classes, but that didn’t get in my way; I was a standout on a very good Warriors football team, and
during that final year of high school, I fell in love for the first time, too.

  Kathleen Carney was a dark-haired Irish beauty, the best athlete and cheerleader among all the girls in the school. She was also—I was aware from the start—someone who had pledged herself to her boyfriend Bill, who was a year older and away in Lincoln attending the University of Nebraska. Their understanding was that she could date other guys during her senior year, but as soon as she graduated, she would be off to NU herself, where they would be reunited.

  Kathy and I began to get close when she offered to help me with my homework and I accepted—although I don’t remember ever doing a lick of homework! I was too entranced by her. She liked me, too, and we spent all the time together we could. Soon, we were dating, and before long we had fallen in love. People belittle those first big romantic experiences, but your first love is your biggest love because it’s all-consuming, so new and powerful, and for me, falling in love with Kathy had a kind of intensity that someone who craved intensity was certain to find irresistible. My memories of Kathy and how I felt about her—how I felt so wonderfully alive when I was with her—remain fresh in my mind and in my heart. Still fresh in memory, too, was a moment in the springtime when we were driving along in my ’55 Plymouth convertible and I swear there were singing angels around, floating. I couldn’t see the road at all. It was unbelievable.

  Rebel Without a Cause had come out a couple of years before; every teenager in America had seen it two or three times, and even a “good girl” like Kathy was pretty taken with James Dean and the character he played in the film, Jim Stark, a kid who rages against authority as he struggles to understand who he is. Kathy surely saw a parallel or two between Jim and me. “You should become an actor,” I remember her telling me as we sat in my convertible, her big dark eyes shining in the low light.

  “No,” I quickly responded. “I’d never want to be an actor. I couldn’t do that. I don’t think it’s the kind of world a man would want to be in.” It was a short conversation, and Kathy didn’t suggest it again. It was the first time anyone had ever suggested such a thing. Soon our senior year drew near its close and one night she told me she loved me, she did, but she loved Bill, too, and she had promised to be true to him. She was going back to Bill, but she wanted us to be friends.

  I was devastated. I was completely destroyed and was certain my life had just ended. I didn’t go sit for my graduation portrait, didn’t attend the ceremony, and I remember lying on the grass in Kathy’s front yard at about nine o’clock one early summer night, crying my eyes out because I hurt so bad. Kathy never came out to comfort me, but when the front door finally opened, her father stepped onto the porch and said, “Young man, don’t you think that’s about enough?”

  I supposed he was right, and I struggled to my feet and got into the Plymouth and popped the clutch and drove off with the loud squeal of the convertible’s tires. I was still crying, and knocking back a quart of beer I had with me to try to get calm, but I was driving erratically and a cop pulled me over. Getting my ass thrown in jail was going to be a fitting end to my misery, I thought, but when the cop asked what the trouble was, I told him, and he genuinely seemed sympathetic to my troubles. When a second police car stopped, the officer explained to his curious fellow cop that this poor kid had a broken heart. It was as simple as that, and both policemen really seemed to care. They were amazing.

  “Let’s get you home. You need some sleep,” one of them said with emotion in his voice. So, they did—one officer driving my Plymouth and the other escorting us in his cruiser. I went to bed as they suggested, although I’m not sure I slept a bit that night—the pain was just too sharp. By morning I knew I had to get as far away as I could from Kathy Carney and Omaha, Nebraska, and all the hurt the world could offer.

  WHEN MY DAD ASKED ME SOMETIME LATER WHAT I PLANNED to do with myself, I told him I thought I’d try to find a place to play football somewhere. In those days, the timing on finding one’s way to college was more fluid. By the time the summer was well under way, Dad and Mom had started making calls to people they knew and eventually we got a yes from Arizona State. Possibly because of my parents’ connections combined with my high school record, they were willing to let me “walk on,” which meant that although I wasn’t recruited, I could try out, and could make the team if I was good enough. The school was a long way from Omaha, so it sounded fine to me, and I packed a few belongings into my little MG convertible, which I’d acquired over the summer as a replacement for the Plymouth, and headed southwest.

  I was told on the first day by an assistant coach that my grades weren’t high enough to get in as a freshman. I had to go up to a junior college and the coach was expecting me and they had it all arranged. Eastern Arizona College, in the hamlet of Thatcher, is in the southeastern part of the state near the New Mexico border.

  Thatcher, I soon discovered, was a town that was heavily Mormon; Safford, its pint-sized twin city about a mile away, was filled with Jack Mormons—people raised in the church who couldn’t be bothered to live by its rules and regulations—which meant that the prevailing attitudes in that particular corner of the Wild West were certainly conventional and very conservative. Anything out of the ordinary, like a little English sports car, for example, received immediate and suspicious attention.

  The football coach at Eastern Arizona, whose name was Beaks, as I recall, seemed happy to have me come to town. He had arranged a room for me in a dorm at the college. I was punting and playing defensive end in practice, and although there was precious little to like about the place, well, it was football, and when I was on the field my broken heart didn’t hurt quite as much as it had a couple of months before.

  Then Coach Beaks called me over one day and said, “Nick, looks like we’ve got us problem. Seems like some folks think you’re driving that little car of yours a little too wild-like around town. Around here, you can get yourself arrested with something called a citizen’s report, and I guess that’s what they got.” The coach went on to explain that he had to drive me over to speak with the local judge about my transgressions.

  I said okay and the next thing I knew we were parked in front of a little tract house where a gray-haired lady answered the door. She invited us in and the coach and I sat on her couch, and it wasn’t until she called me “Mr. Nolte” that I realized she must be the judge.

  “Mr. Nolte, I want you to understand that you’re driving that little sports car of yours too fast for this town. You are going around turns and spinning your wheels and screeching and it is just too reckless.” I nodded and she continued. “We want you to have a good season, but we don’t want you to be driving that car around here.” I nodded again before she gave me her sentence. “I’ve made an arrangement with the Safford jail for you to spend thirty nights there. Coach Beaks will pick you up and bring you to Thatcher for your classes and your football practice and he’ll take you back to Safford at the end of each afternoon.”

  When it was my turn to speak, I told the judge that I wasn’t too excited about her plan, and she stiffened and told me I really didn’t have any choice. Either I would do as she had arranged or I would spend sixty days in jail, which would end any football plans I might have had. I told the judge that, in that case, I would accept her proposal, and she smiled thinly and told me she was glad to hear me say something intelligent, and that was that.

  So, the coach drove me over to the imposing old courthouse building in nearby Safford, and inside he introduced me to a desk sergeant who stuck out his hand and said, “Good to meet you, Nick Nolte. You’re going to be spending nights with us, I understand.” I told him yes, that was the way I understood things, too. He explained that there were normally two or three cells open right behind his desk, and I could choose the one I wanted to sleep in.

  I nodded my head in acquiescence and started toward one of the cells before he stopped me. “But you know something, Nick, you don’t have to go in there now. You only have to sleep there; y
ou don’t have to go in there ’til you get tired.”

  I told him I didn’t know Safford at all, or Thatcher for that matter, and wasn’t sure what I’d do when I wasn’t sleeping. The friendly police sergeant thought for a moment, then said, “Well, you could ride around with us, I suppose.”

  A grin must have curled onto my face when I said I’d love to ride around in a police car with him and his fellow officers, and that’s exactly what happened. For the rest of my “sentence,” I slept in the tiny Safford jail, showered in the locker room at the football field in Thatcher, then spent the rest of my time with the local cops. It was unbelievable.

  Over the weeks and months that followed, I got to know where the local gambling games were dependably unfolding, where the well-hidden whorehouses were, where the one or two tough characters in town were likely to be wasting their time. I liked the cops and they liked me, and although I slept with my Westside High senior yearbook every night so I could look at Kathy’s photograph as often as I wanted to, the days and nights passed quickly, and little by little, my heart began to mend.

  WHEN I FINALLY GOT TO LEAVE THE SAFFORD JAIL AT THE end of the semester, I moved to a little place my friend and fellow Eastern Arizona teammate Neil Layton offered me, one he cautioned that I’d have to share with his friend Memo, who was a Mexican/Apache, about ten years older than me—and a great guy. Memo soon became a mentor/father figure to me, introducing me to the subtleties of poker and sleight of hand. During that time, I made regular explorations south to the conjoined towns of Douglas and Agua Prieta, the latter a little city on the Mexican side of the border.