So Quinn compensated for the humiliation by over-preparing—memorizing the playbook (he had an eidetic memory); watching game film until he was bleary-eyed; absorbing everything the coaches said; throwing until his arm felt like it would fall off; and working out until his feet were calloused and his hands, raw and bleeding.
It was one thing to prepare for a game, another to play it. The annals of QB history were filled with the urban legends of men who were all parade, no battle. And Quinn feared not only that his lack of field time would stunt his development as a QB but that it was also what he secretly desired—to stay safe on the sidelines. But that was not what quarterbacks were born for. So he kept himself primed to such an extent that he didn't need the cuff other QBs wore with a cheat sheet of the various plays. He knew them by heart.
That comforted him a bit, as did the fans' encouragement.
"No-vak, No-vak, No-vak," they chanted, while girls in fetching outfits that revealed plenty of cleavage and thighs reddened by the autumn chill held up signs saying, "Quinn for the win."
The man with the aptly rhyming moniker, however, had no illusions about the fans. They were the mob, the modern equivalent of the ancient Roman rabble. They liked him, because they didn't know him and could write whatever narrative they wanted on what they thought was a tabula rasa. The minute they discovered who he was, they might turn on him, especially if he didn't deliver.
But he knew he would never disappoint—if given the chance. He also knew that nothing short of a miracle would give him that chance, certainly not a mere dismal trouncing by newbie franchise the Orlando Copperheads.
"Smalley, Smalley, burn in Hell," the fans shouted along the railing as the team skulked toward the locker room at halftime, trailing 35-7. "Muldavey, Moll, you're worthless. You're all maggot bastards. Not you, Novak. We want you in there for the second half."
When the press criticized his teammates and gleefully reported their transgressions—an easy pursuit, for they were many—Quinn tried to remember the vomit of vulgarity that fans spewed in their faces week after week. Not since his days at Stanford, when rival fans would text him death threats before a game, had he encountered such viciousness.
The Templar fans' rage was equaled only by Smalley's halftime rants, which rhymed four-letter words in surprisingly inventive ways: Pornography, meet poetry, Quinn thought. Or at least anatomically impossible rap. (He himself tried to refrain from cursing until Thursdays, figuring if the week hadn't improved by then it was unlikely to do so, and even then he reserved it for moments of high emotion.)
During these tirades, he had learned to stay transfixed on the litany of verbal abuse else Smalley might think you weren't paying sufficient attention.
"Having a low-blood sugar moment, are we?" Smalley said the day Greg Moll had the temerity to unwrap a Mini Snickers during one of these "Poetry Slams." Smalley took the candy then and shoved it down Greg's throat so forcefully that he began to gag and Quinn and the others had to intervene.
Such volatility was the tip of the globally warmed iceberg. That most of the team wasn't serving time in Sing Sing was its real accomplishment, Quinn thought. There was safety Cesare Dalton, who had beaten an involuntary manslaughter rap after he choked his girlfriend to death during rough sex; punter Indigo West, who had been arrested trying to buy weed and coke from an undercover cop in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge; and ever-prolific tackle Jeremiah Dupré, who had 15 kids by 12 women in 11 states. Such was the achievement that Greg and Derrick Muldavey, who would've fancied themselves team ironists had they understood the concept of postmodern irony, once presented Jeremiah with a framed map of the United States containing diamond push pins where he had "multiplied, filled the earth and subdued it," in the words of the Good Book. Jeremiah was so touched he broke down and cried, hugging his generous teammates.
Sometimes, some of the Jeremiah juniors visited the locker room, where they clung to various players like barnacles to a boat, for Jeremiah was an affectionate if understandably distracted daddy. Quinn felt sorry for the Jere juniors and tried to be patient with them and their endless questions, their touching of things that didn't belong to them and general interference. Perhaps they reminded him of himself. They certainly reminded him of his long-cherished dream and the reason he tolerated everything the NFL had thrown at him—to build a new, state-of-the-art orphanage and school in Jakarta.
"Get these bastards out of here," Smalley would yell at the risk of offending Jeremiah, who was one of his best players.
No worries: The actual Jeremiah Junior, the oldest of the litter at age 10, gave as good as he got.
"You're kind of fat," he said to Smalley, who turned beet-red.
"Kind of?" Greg whispered to Derrick, who caught Quinn's eye, and the three dissolved into giggles, which was why they were running an extra ten miles in the rain the next day.
"That's right," Smalley screamed. "When I'm finished with you guys, you'll be too tired to laugh, let alone suck dick."
Such punishments were worth it, though, Quinn thought, for the opportunity to savor the way Jere Junior had stood up to Smalley—Quinn never called him "Coach" except to his face, preferring to refer to him instead as "Small E"—and for the look on his face.
At least no one questioned Jeremiah's sexual prowess. Whereas, if you weren't doing it with a woman or talking about doing it with a woman every five minutes you were suspect. Quinn hadn't been with the team long before the, "So, dating anyone special? If not, I know this chick," conversation began.
It's not that he didn't find women objectively attractive. It's just that he was sexually excited by men, two in particular—Tamarind Tarquin, the quarterback of the San Francisco Miners, and Mallory Ryan, the Philadelphia Quakers' QB.
Often late at night, when he couldn't sleep, Quinn would imagine the three of them in bed, engaged in a water-dance with himself in the middle, melting into their arms as he surrendered to and received their strength. While he stroked his erect cock in a soft cloth slathered with lube, he thought of Tam pinning his arms behind his back as he entered him and Mal sucked him off, then came, smearing the come on his belly.
The fantasy would leave the shivering Quinn sticky and sated but also ashamed as he was one of those men for whom sex was not enough. He wanted to love and be loved.
Of course, it was a dream too far, Quinn knew. That's what made it so delicious. In reality, Mal was rumored to have a girlfriend or two, while Tam was said to be a player, with a different date for every red-carpet event. Even if they were free and gay, they hated each other, perhaps owing to their having been rivals since their high school days in Philly—an antagonism that reached its pinnacle when the Quakers drafted Mal instead of Tam, which sportscasters couldn't stop mentioning.
But it would be exquisite, wouldn't it, Quinn thought, to test his mettle against them on the field and then off it in an arena of another kind, one buffeted by cool, silky 600 thread-count sheets, soft pillows and whispers of things you did only in the dark.
"So, got a girl?" Jeremiah asked Quinn after the Temps' 48-7 loss to the Copperheads.
With that, Brenna James of The New York Record came rushing into the locker room and proceeded to spill the contents of her huge, green suede hobo bag.
"Oh, God, I'm sorry," she said as Quinn helped her collect her compact and cell and their eyes locked. "I'm so clumsy."
"Not at all," Quinn said, smiling at her.
He watched as she tramped to Smalley's office.
"Sometimes," he said to Jeremiah, "you want what you can't have."
Jeremiah nodded as if he knew what he didn't.
Four
In life, there is only narrative, Quinn realized.
Control the narrative, and you control public opinion. That was real power.
Brenna had that kind of power. As a columnist for The Wreck, she had alluded to Smalley's prejudice against Quinn in the past. Now she actively lobbied for him to replace Lance. In a column titled Free Q
uinn Novak, she delivered the coup de grace:
Pharaoh was forced to free the Israelites from bondage in Egypt.
Lincoln liberated the slaves.
It's time for the New York Templars to get off their assets. Play Quinn Novak or trade him to a place where his many admirers can thrill to this transcendent talent.
Soon, Free Quinn Novak T-shirts, mugs, banners, and parties began cropping up around New York. Others tweeted, Instagram-ed, Facebook-ed, blogged, and—oh, yes—wrote about him, or Brenna writing about him. He became a cause célèbre even among those who knew nothing of football.
It wasn't the kind of fame he wanted—to be known for who he was rather than what he did. But he could hardly complain when the perks and endorsements that came his way helped others, including the orphans back in Indonesia. Then came the backlash.
"I want that bitch muzzled," he overheard Smalley say to two men in one of the "catacombs"—the yellow-green and blue cinder-block tunnels that snaked through the bowels of the stadium. "I don't care how you do it, just do it."
Alarmed, Quinn texted her.
"Don't worry (lol)," she texted back. "I can take care of myself."
Still, she was subjected to death threats, received packages containing used condoms, and was even hit in the back with a football "unintentionally" by tight end Taylor Higgs, one of Lance's henchmen—which led Quinn to call him out.
"Stay away from her," Quinn told him, "or you—and anyone else who tries to harm her—will answer to me."
"Ooh, I'm scared," Taylor said, laughing.
Quinn smiled. Then he decked him. Hey, he figured, some people never learn.
"I don't want you to stick your neck out for me anymore," he wrote Brenna in a note that accompanied a dozen red roses interspersed with stargazer lilies. "Still, I appreciate it more than I can say. If you ever need anything, you come to me."
"She's nothing but Novak's whore," a teammate,Taylor? Lance?, was quoted anonymously as saying, which raised a momentary firestorm in the press once again about the NFL's continuing female trouble—this despite new regulations implemented after its domestic abuse crisis—and the way men fought one another on the battlefield of female sexuality.
Though everyone denounced the remark, it suggested that the columnist and the quarterback were secret lovers, which both were quick to deny, thereby only stoking the rumors.
Those rumors had their advantage. The "So, got a girl?" questions ceased. It was, Quinn knew, a sad world when a lie and a possible breach of journalistic ethics were preferable to him than revealing the truth that he was a gay virgin. He continued to say nothing, though. And that was sad, too. But then, he was no Michael Sam. At least not yet. Why declare his preference for a certain "team" when he had yet to play for it, right?
The Free Quinn Novak campaign came to a head in a stunning way when Lance broke his left leg in the wee hours of a Sunday morning before the big game against the loathed Philadelphia Quakers and quarterback Mal Ryan.
"There is indeed a God," one fan tweeted, "because Lance-o-little couldn't stink up the joint more."
That was before the Twitteratti got wind of how Lance broke his leg. It seemed that he and "muy caliente Argentine soul-mate"—as she was invariably described in the press to such an extent that it became an epithet, like "rosy-fingered dawn" in The Iliad—had been engaging in some lubricious foreplay involving the new Black Orchid body lotion when Lance slid off her and the bed, suffering a freak stress fracture.
"'What a fall was there,'" one surprisingly literary poster wrote on the Temps' blog, echoing that great coach known as the Bard.
"In a fall worthy of Adam and Eve," The New York Gazette intoned, "Lancelot Reinhart slid off muy caliente Argentine soul-mate Ileana Cardenas and into a maelstrom of controversy and uncertainty, throwing the Temps' season into doubt."
"Season? What season?" Derrick said after reading the story. "Do we have a season? And what doubt? The way I look at it there's no doubt where we're headed—the bottom of our division."
Smalley was so inconsolable that he started hyperventilating.
"We have to win this one for Lance," he gasped between sobs.
"Not quite Brian's Song, is it?" Greg whispered to Derrick.
"Hey, hey," Smalley yelled at them, his face growing so red that his players feared blood would start gushing from his nostrils. "The leader of this team is hurting. Have some respect. Donaldson, it's on your shoulders tonight. Make Lance proud."
Stunned, embarrassed silence. Quinn knew Smalley hated him. Now he knew just how much. To pass him over for Dave, it was more than humiliating. Even Dave himself didn't think he should start.
When the Freers or Quinnies—as Quinn's fans were known—found out, they exploded.
"Since when is the second-string quarterback passed over for the third?" Brenna texted. "Oh, right, when they play for Smalley."
"Just want to wish you the best, man," Quinn told Dave, giving him a bro shoulder bump.
"I can't do it," Dave said.
"Of course, you can," Quinn said. "As my aunt always said, ‘Have courage and life will meet you halfway.'"
"No, you don't understand," and with that Dave let loose a stream of projectile vomit worthy of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Whereupon the trainer and team physician were summoned—to say nothing of the clubhouse man with a mop and bucket—and Dave was pronounced ill enough from the flu to be sent off to the hospital.
Smalley didn't say anything to Quinn before the game. He didn't have to. Quinn was feeling enough pressure. This was the nationally televised Sunday night game, and the stakes were made clear by the mediocre-former-players-turned-commentators who bloviated on the pregame show.
"Boy oh boy, Coach, with Lance Reinhart out for the season and Dave Donaldson a scratch, facing perhaps the greatest team the NFL has ever produced, the entire Temps' season rests on the lean shoulders of one rookie quarterback Quinton Day Novak," Rufus Washington salivated with his usual ungrammatical earnestness to former coach and broadcast partner Joe Nowicki. "And you know, Coach, the Temps' fans have to be wondering about now if he's up to the challenge."
"Well, Ruf, we'll know in a few hours, won't we?"
Yes, Ruf, we sure will, Quinn thought as he passed the TV. Jesus Christ, no wonder people thought football players were no-neck neo-Neanderthals.
"Look," Quinn told his teammates before play began, "I'm not going to make a big speech, because we've had enough drama for a whole season, let alone one day. All I want to say is, we can make the drama worthwhile by winning this."
Early on, it looked as if that would be impossible as the Quakers' defense boxed Quinn in. But then he remembered himself. Finding he couldn't get rid of the ball, he simply ran with it. And suddenly he was no longer at Templars Stadium but back there—back in Jakarta with Nemin, Adhi, Sumarti, Gde, his baseball teammates and Aunt Lena—all the people he loved and who loved him. He would not break faith with them.
In the end zone, he raised his arms triumphantly. He could've kept on running, so great was the rush. Instead, he dropped to one knee quickly and, just as quickly, crossed himself. "Thank you, God," he prayed. "And thanks, Aunt Lee."
He jogged back to his position, acknowledging neither the cheers, which were now all-enveloping, nor the steam pouring from the nostrils of the opposition.
The Quakers sacked him, and his brain pushed against his aching skull and helmet. His mind longed to slip the confines of bone and plastic as his body—ravaged by the opposition's pile-on—was buried alive.
"Get the fuck off him." His teammates were yelling now, the sounds indistinct at first as if he were underwater—or beyond the grave. Only slowly did the words come into focus as his teammates clawed their way to free him, bringing with them a lightness of feeling. He knew then that they had his back, knew he would rise again. For this was what he did; this was who he was; this was all he had to give.
He was under center again—clear-headed once more, cool, collected,
commanding.
"22, 55, hut," he directed, his trained baritone channeled and strong. On the field of battle that day, Quinn found his voice and knew it would pierce the cold, the crowd, anything.
The Quakers struck back—the empire always does—but they would never recover from the shock of Quinn drawing first blood as they lost 21-14.
After the game and all the following week, the story was about Quinn—"Rookie QB Stuns Super Bowl Champs."
This is what the Quinnies wanted, Brenna wrote in her postgame column, which was equal parts glee and schadenfreude, to see their man have his moment in the sun. And he didn't disappoint. All his promise and all the tragedy and heartache he's endured—the long road from Jakarta, the waiting on the sidelines as other men got the call—all of it was fulfilled today.
He was, as Rumours magazine noted, "the toast of the town." Even talk-show hosts who had made fun of him were deluging the Temps' easily exasperated PR guy, Harvey Soffel, to book him.
"Thank you for this," Quinn said when he caught up with Brenna after a practice session.
"You're welcome for this, but I did nothing. It was you. You're on your way."
"That remains to be seen," Quinn said. "People recover from the flu. Broken legs heal."
Brenna shook her head. "They'll have a hard time putting this genie back in the bottle."
What he remembered most from that strange, wonderful day, though, was not what she said or the fans or the crush of media but Mal coming up to congratulate him in the postgame ritual in which winners and losers exchanged words of bland grace that rode on plumes of breath in the night air.
The Penalty for Holding Page 3