Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  I watched for another minute then walked up to the deserted dorm complex. Bluerock had been told to skip practice in order to talk to me. He was supposed to be waiting in one of the basement rooms that the coaches used for offices. I found the right room fairly quickly, but I didn’t find Bluerock inside—just a desk and a chair and a little piece of sunlight that had fallen through an open window and flattened itself on the concrete floor.

  I thought I might have gotten the room numbers mixed up, so I rattled a few other doorknobs on the basement floor. When no one answered, I walked upstairs, looking for someone who could tell me what had become of Otto. A transistor radio had been left on in one of the rooms on the ground floor. I followed its tinny voice down the hall to an open door by the fire exit.

  A man was lying on a single bed inside the room. He was wearing khaki shorts, sneakers, and a gray sweatshirt that had ridden up his fat belly. I couldn’t see his face because he was holding a comic book in front of it. On a nightstand by the bed the transistor radio was playing “Stand by Your Man.” The man tapped his sneakered foot against the air in time to the music, and when Tammy broke into the refrain, he joined in loudly in a froggy bass. I let him finish the song then knocked on the doorframe.

  “What can I do for you?” he said, without lowering the comic book.

  “I’m trying to find Otto Bluerock. Know where he is?”

  The man on the bed dropped the comic to his chest and lunged forward, pulling himself upright with a jerk. It was a little like having a bulldog lunge at me. He had that kind of face—fierce, square-jawed, with a scowling, jowly mouth, heavy-lidded gray eyes, and a knobby, puckered brow. His brown hair was cut very short, dipping down his forehead in a broad U. His upper body was enormous—duckpin arms, barrel chest, neck like a steel truss. Only the gut betrayed his lack of conditioning. It gathered above his thighs like a loose undershirt.

  “Otto Bluerock?” he said in a deep suspicious voice. “Who’s looking for him?”

  “Harry Stoner.”

  The man swung his legs onto the floor. His knees were heavily scarred. Keloid zippers, the kind that come from reconstructive surgery. He pressed his palms on top of them, as if he were testing the seams, and slowly got to his feet. He was a good six three. My height, but fifty pounds of fat and muscle heavier.

  “I’m Bluerock,” he said, holding out a hand.

  I shook with him and winced. Bluerock had a grip like a trash compactor.

  “Take it easy!” I said.

  He dropped my hand as if it were infected and gave me a contemptuous look. “If I were you, sport, I’d work on that handshake some. Do some curls, for chrissake. You don’t want people thinking you’re a fag, do you?”

  “I didn’t know it was a contest,” I said, although I wanted to punch him in the mouth. I was better than forty years old, in reasonable shape, and fairly mature about most matters; but for some stupid reason, getting beaten to the draw by this ox made me feel like I was sixteen again.

  “Didn’t know it was a contest?” Bluerock said with a dismissive sneer. “Now how the hell could a man not know that?”

  Staring at Bluerock’s surly face, I suddenly realized why he’d made me feel like I was back in high school. I’d met him before—in every gym class I’d ever been in. He was the joker who liked to snap towels at your ass in the locker room and to beat up the Jews and niggers on the playing field. I used to wonder what happened to assholes like him once they got out into the real world. Now I knew. They grew up to become pro football players.

  For a guy with a very cold future staring him in the face come Friday, Otto Bluerock seemed pretty goddamn loose.

  “So you’re the one they’re sending after Billy?” he said, giving me another cold sizing up. “Jeez, I hope you’ve got your Blue Cross paid up, fella.”

  “You figure there’s going to be trouble, huh?”

  “Naw. Billy likes fags in sports coats.” He sat back down on the mattress, which sang out in distress under his weight. “Pull up a chair, sport.”

  There were no chairs in the room. I leaned against the doorjamb.

  “Shoot away,” Bluerock said. “All I got is time.”

  “The rest of your life, from what I hear.” I said it to pay him back for the handshake and the ragging. And to my surprise, it got to him. Just a little, just for a second. His eyes went wide, then closed to slits.

  “Funny man,” he said under his breath.

  My business sense got the better of my adolescent streak. After all, I had to talk to the man, or get him to talk to me. “Forget I said that,” I told him.

  He grunted. “Why? Everybody’s got to quit some day. Tomorrow’s my day. That’s all. Time to get on with my life’s work.” He said the last part mockingly, as if the phrase “life’s work” were a familiar cliché in his world. “I had eleven good seasons. That’s more than most.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What do you know? You’re a fucking civilian.”

  He had a point. He hadn’t gotten those scars on his knees snapping towels at people’s asses. Or the scar that ran through his right brow. Or the flabby, flattened nose that comes when they take the cartilage out when the nose has been broken too many times to repair. He’d paid his dues, all right. So had I. But now wasn’t the time to say so.

  A big cheer went up from somewhere down on the football field. Bluerock flinched.

  “Sounds like they’re done,” he said. He looked around the barren room and stood up. “What say we get out of here, sport? I feel like hoisting a few.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Just clicked off the radio and brushed past me out the door.

  3

  WE WENT to a bar in a bowling alley on the north side of town. Bluerock told me how to get there, and that was all he had to say until we’d gotten inside the building, past the inevitable glass case with the register on top and the bowling ball and tinned plastic trophies on display, and settled in a “lounge” with a commanding view of alleys 1 through 10. The fact that I knew that he was going to be cut had apparently nicked Bluerock’s pride more deeply than I’d thought. Or maybe he’d suddenly realized that a lot of other people were bound to find out.

  I didn’t feel particularly sorry for him. He was a bully, and like all bullies he was easy to hurt and quick to pity himself. But I could appreciate how strange it had to feel, after eleven seasons, to come to the end of the road. A road that had ended not because he’d wanted it to, but because someone else had decided that he couldn’t hack it anymore, that it was time for him to get on with his “life’s work.”

  We were sitting in the lounge, drinking beer. Below us the bowlers made a thick, explosive racket. Bluerock’s bulldog face grew grimmer with each pitcher. He began to look like a man aching for a fight. Like Parks had looked in that picture. He also got more sentimental, more self-righteous, and oddly, more articulate with each beer. I knew that he was going to explode before the night was out, possibly in my direction. A smart man would have left him to his booze and his furies. But I wanted to hear about Parks. And some kindred part of me didn’t think he should be drinking alone—perhaps the same part that had wanted to punch him out twenty minutes before.

  “You know why they hired you, don’t you?” he said, after he’d downed the first four glasses of beer very quickly.

  “To find Parks.”

  “Bullshit,” Bluerock said. “They hired you to get rid of him, man. To nail his ass to the wall. They’ve been dying to unload him for a long time.”

  “Why?”

  “His agent. They don’t like his agent. Plus Bill’s had some problems.”

  “Like what?”

  He laughed. “Like you don’t already know, huh?”

  “I know about the girls he beat up, yeah.”

  Bluerock stared somberly into his beer glass. “Some of those bimbos were looking to get hurt.”

  “Like Candy Kane?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer me right a
way.

  “What do you know about football players?” Bluerock finally said. “All you see are those media whores on TV. The ones who make careers out of proving how deep and sensitive they really are. Football’s war, for chrissake! What else could you call it, when the object is to go out there and beat the other guy into the ground, to bury him under the turf? Before he sold out on TV, Dick Butkus was a vicious, violent son-of-a-bitch. Now he gets dressed up in a monkey suit and acts cute and dopey and everybody thinks that’s what he was like all along—that he really was this sweet, funny guy underneath. Well, let me tell you something. You’re not one guy on the football field and another fucking thing off it, no matter how it looks on TV. Guys like Butkus and guys like Bill Parks aren’t putting on an act out there, sport. They’re not playing the game for your entertainment. It isn’t a game to them at all. You’re seeing who they really are when they belt some guy so hard that he has to be carried off the field on a stretcher. And I’ll tell you something else—you’re loving it. You’re screaming your goddamn head off. ‘Kill him! Kill the fucker!’ But when Bill knocks some faggot on his ass in a bar or punches out some whore who tries to stiff him, suddenly it isn’t such a terrific thing. Right? Suddenly, he’s a sick guy.”

  “So if you’re tough, it’s okay to beat up women,” I said.

  Bluerock glared at me. “You’re not fucking listening to me, pal. I’m wasting my breath on you. Nobody I know gives a shit whether you think what they do is okay or not. I’m telling you about a game that doesn’t stop when you step off the field or when they tell you not to bother to show up at practice anymore. I’m talking about what it’s like to be a player, man. You know? A player.”

  “I’m listening,” I told him, although I could see that it was too late for conciliation. The beer had caught up with him and he was ready to explode.

  “The hell you are,” he said, throwing his right hand dangerously close to my jaw. “Nobody’s listening. Nobody ever does. All they do is tell you things, and all they’ve got to say, from the moment you first suit up to the moment it’s over, is bullshit. Bullshit!”

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  “You take it easy, motherfucker.” He poured another glass of beer and gave me a look that was nothing less than a threat—a naked dare to open my mouth again. I used common sense and clammed up.

  “Bullshit!” he said again, and gave me another red-eyed, ferocious look. “You want to hear about Bill Parks?” he said, swallowing the beer in one gulp. “I’ll tell you about Bill Parks. I’ll explain it so even an asshole like you can understand.” He slammed the beer glass down, leaned across the table, and stared fiercely into my eyes. “Between the white lines, they tell him, ‘Be an animal. Be hard. Be tough. Don’t give any quarter. If you got your foot on somebody’s neck, don’t let up. Keep the pressure on until you hear the bones break. ‘Cause in this world you’re either a heel or a neck. And heel is better.’ Coach drums it into him, Dad drums it into him—his mom, his girl. They all expect him to be a killer on the field. Now, they don’t think about where all that violence is coming from—what it has to do with him as a person. Or with them. They just like to see it happen. They like to watch it come out in the open and run around loose for a couple of hours. But off the field it’s a different story. Christ, is it different!

  “Off the field, they say, ‘Be Mr. all-American. Be the gentle giant. Don’t get mad, don’t use your edge, because after all, you’re bigger than other people, and somebody might get hurt.’” Bluerock snorted with disgust. “You hear what I’m saying? You’re supposed to be able to turn it on and off at will—to be a killer and a well-rounded individual at the same time. To be a warrior and a wimp. Like it’s all make-believe, for chrissake! Like it has nothing to do with real life!” He threw himself back in his chair so violently that he almost tipped it over. “It’s a fucking impossible lie! And that’s Bill Parks’s problem, sport. That’s all there is to it. Not the bimbos. He just couldn’t turn the game off like he was supposed to do. He couldn’t stop being a player. Understand?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “No, you don’t understand. You can’t. You’re not one of us.”

  ******

  We sat in silence, drinking beer, for another half hour or so. By then several more Cougars had come into the lounge, to down a few quick ones before lights out. A couple of players looked as if they wanted to talk to Bluerock, but Otto ignored them. He was in a world of his own now, and I guessed he was trying to get used to it.

  Around seven, a tall kid with the physique of a bodybuilder walked into the bar, spotted Bluerock, and came over to the table. He had the kind of face that Parks had had when he was his age—big brow, nose like a gherkin, a crevice for eyes, and a baby’s thick, flared, crimson lips. He was wearing a muscle shirt with “Property of Cougars” printed on it, and he sauntered as if he figured that everyone in the world would be watching him. He did have quite a set of arms—big-veined, massive, with huge squared-off biceps and forearms so hard and well-defined that the skin looked as if it had been flayed away, like drawings in an anatomy book. Bluerock was as big as this kid, but in nowhere near the same kind of condition.

  “Missed you at practice, Blue,” the kid said, in a needling voice.

  Bluerock looked up from his glass balefully. “You know,” he said to me, “it’s not often in life that you get to meet your own doom. But there he is, in the flesh. Number Double Zero. My replacement.” He waved a hand in the kid’s direction. “The funny thing is that the putz looks just like I used to look.”

  “You didn’t call me a putz,” the kid said lazily. He looked at me. “He didn’t call me putz, did he?”

  I stared back at the kid. He was enjoying himself at Bluerock’s expense, which was pretty stupid under the circumstances. I fully expected Otto to punch his lights out.

  “Careful,” the kid said when Bluerock lifted his beer glass to his lips. “You’ll get some in your mouth.”

  Bluerock put the beer glass down on the table daintily and sighed. “Did Professor Walt send you over to check up on us, Fred? Is that the deal? Or did you do a little too much juice tonight? You feeling studdy, Fred?” Bluerock blew him a kiss.

  Fred grinned at me. “You shouldn’t believe everything he says, mister. He’s a terrible liar. He was a shitty football player too. All mouth.”

  “Get lost, Freddy,” Bluerock said dully.

  “Sure, Blue,” Fred said. “You have a nice life, hear?” He laughed loudly and walked away.

  I watched the kid saunter out of the bar, then turned to Bluerock. “What’s his problem?”

  Bluerock smiled icily. “His problem is that he’s twenty-three years old and he thinks he’s going to stay that way forever.” The smile disappeared. “I hit him a little harder than I should have the other day in practice. Knocked him on his can. It’s one thing to get beat, another to get knocked off your feet. Especially to a guy like him.”

  “What’s so special about him?”

  Bluerock stirred in his chair. “Maybe I’ll tell you about it on the way downtown.”

  “We’re going downtown?”

  Bluerock got up and headed toward the exit.

  “I guess we are,” I said to myself.

  4

  HALFWAY BACK to Cincinnati I stopped at a roadside bar to let Bluerock buy a quart of Scotch. As soon as he got back in the car, he cracked the bottle open and took a long drink. I started the Pinto up and eased back onto the highway. I wasn’t sure where we were headed. I hoped we’d end up somewhere near Bill Parks, but that was up to Bluerock. It was his night to howl, even though I’d become part of it. Hell, I’d made myself part of it, boosting him to beers and encouraging him to talk about his career. Now I felt obliged to live the rest of the night out with him—no matter where he led me. Such is the vanity of a drunken, middle-aged fan.

  “It’s been a long time since I got really loaded,” Bluerock said, handing the bottle to me.

  I took a drink an
d gave it back to him.

  “I used to like booze,” he said, as he polished the spout on the palm of his hand. “But you give up a lot of things along the way.” He tipped the bottle to his lips and took another swallow. “Last good fight I got into was in a bar. A bar in Madison, Wisconsin.”

  “What was it about?”

  He looked at me blankly. “Huh?”

  “The fight,” I said. “What was it about?”

  “It wasn’t about anything,” Bluerock said, as if the question made no sense. “There were just a bunch of us in a bar and somebody started throwing furniture around. Before it was over, we’d torn the place apart. Broken chairs, broken tables, broken glasses. Everybody lying on the floor groaning. Just like in a western. I mean, we leveled the joint. You know what the best part was?”

  He straightened up in the seat and rocked forward, as if recalling the story had made him feel alive again. “The guy who owns the place comes out from behind the bar, looks at the mess, and starts to whoop. ‘Boys,’ he says, ‘I’ve been waiting all my life for a fight like this to break out in my place. And I want to thank you for it. Tonight, you’ve made an old man’s dream come true.’ The son-of-a-bitch was genuinely grateful! I’m not kidding, sport. He was beside himself. He even bought us all one for the road!”

  I started to laugh. So did Bluerock. We were both pretty drunk, so we laughed for a while. The laughter died out all at once, as it will when you’re loaded, and we spent a few minutes mourning it—and the passing of all fellow feeling—in silence.

  “Liquor’s been a part of every good time I’ve ever had,” Bluerock said suddenly. “Now what the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Let me give you a f’rinstance. I spent two seasons in Canada, before they called me down to the NFL. Things were a lot looser up there. First day of practice, we get out on the field, and we’re running wind sprints or something. And I happen to notice this big cooler sitting by the bench. So I ask one of the veterans what it’s for. He just smiles and says, ‘You’ll see when we’re through.’ I don’t think much of it. We work out—hard. And when we’re done, we gather around the bench, and I’m waiting for the lecture on slipping a block or the team prayer or whatever the fuck they do in Canada. Then I realize that everybody’s lined up in front of this cooler. I wait my turn, not knowing what to expect. Get to the head of the line. You know what they’re handing out?”