American Outlaw (13 page)

“Pleasure’s all mine,” I said.

We became instant friends. Josh was smart, funny as hell, and best of all, he seemed to hate everyone on the football team even more than I did.

“Every motherfucker’s out for himself,” he complained.

“I hate it,” I agreed.

“These chumps all think they’ll be suiting up in the Big Ten two years from now,” Josh said. He looked at me. “What do you think?”

I said nothing for a moment. “I’m here to play football the way it’s supposed to be played.”

“Course you are,” Josh said, laughing. “You wouldn’t leave even if they begged you, would you, Outlaw Jesse?”

“Well, I didn’t say that,” I admitted. “If a scout comes up to me and wants to talk, then we’ll talk.”

But the scouts were precisely the problem. There was always a murmur going around our locker room:
Scouts are coming to the next game! Scouts’ll be at practice on Thursday!
Talent snoops for big colleges became these mythical figures who could deliver us from our drab lives.

Discontent isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to football. A talented coach would have harnessed our resentment at being outsiders, hitched it to our physical brutality, and made us into a fearsome squadron. But our head coach was trying to get out, too. He’d had offers at UNLV and UTEP, and by God, he was going to sniff them out. Everyone wanted to get out of Riverside and the bush leagues once and for all. That’s the universal dream of junior college, after all: to
leave
junior college.

And I was as guilty of entertaining those fantasies as the rest of them. Each morning I got up thinking I
should
be at Pitt, or Hawaii, or Iowa, or U of Colorado—any of those teams that recruited me. I
was a talented athlete and a leader, but due to my own idiotic lack of foresight, I had ended up going to junior college in the same damn town where I’d gone to high school. We even played our games on the same
field
I’d played on in high school. I felt like I was on the hamster wheel, running faster now, but in the exact same spot.

It felt even more like that when I found out that Rhonda had enrolled as a student at Riverside Community. She and I ran into each other several times, shared several awkward glances, until one day, she finally approached me.

“Jesse,” she said, “I just want to let you know how sorry I am about the way things turned out.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I mumbled. “I’m over it.”

She looked down. “No, I’m serious. I really . . . I really loved you.” Rhonda touched my arm. “I’ve never felt the same about anyone.”

I fell for it, of course. Soon, we were dating again. On Sunday nights, I’d drive us downtown, to get a pizza and a couple of Cokes. But I was ridiculously poor.

“Hey,” I said, “I hate to ask, but . . .”

“It’s no problem,” said Rhonda, smiling, taking out her pocketbook. “You can get us next time, okay?”

I felt embarrassed, but the constant practices and classes kept me so busy that I didn’t have any time to work a job. Stealing was kind of out of the equation nowadays, so pocket cash became hard to come by. I had a beat-up car, but I lacked the money to drive it very often. More than once, I found myself scrounging around in the backseat, digging for seventy-five cents so I could put enough gas in my car to go home.

All the players seemed to be poor. The locker room was falling apart. Only two out of the four showers worked. Our quarterback’s shoes were covered in duct tape. One day, after a particularly grueling practice, I dragged myself up the steps to the parking lot, only to find one of my teammates breaking into my car.

“What the
fuck
are you doing?” I said, stunned.

He looked up at me sheepishly. “Oh, is this your car, Jesse?”

“Yes,
asshole.
” Immediately, my jaw clenched.

Sensing impending harm, he extricated himself with a quickness. “Look, guy, I’m leaving, okay?”

“See ya!” I said, fake-smiling.

The whole thing made me tired. Being broke and without allies could wear the strongest guy down. One evening, after another interminable practice, I pumped the last three dimes I had in the world into the candy machine in our dorm. I was tired as hell. My stomach was growling. All I wanted was a candy bar. I was going to eat it in two bites and collapse into bed.

My money in the machine, I stood in front of the window, sizing up the selection carefully. My eyes fell on a Whatchamacallit, and suddenly, I grinned. Whatchamacallits reminded me of being a kid: when I was nine or ten, my dad had gone to one of his auctions and returned home with a truckload of them.

“What’s
that
?” I asked, my young eyes bugging out.

“Fuckin’ candy bars,” he said.

“Who . . . who are they for?” I asked, breathless, hoping against hope.

He looked at me as if I were stupid. “You. Me. Have as many as you want. Hell, eat ’em all, get ’em out of my life.”

There was something fishy about the boxes upon boxes of candy bars, of course: they were probably stolen from some cargo truck years earlier, then bought for pennies on the dollar by my dad, who didn’t know what the hell to do with them. But for his giant, hungry, ten-year-old son? Absolute heaven. I ate Whatchamacallits that summer until I couldn’t stand them. Until I was straight pooping Whatchamacallits.

I had not tasted a Whatchamacallit in almost a decade. But locked in this dorm of loud, delinquent football drunks, broke beyond belief, suddenly, I desperately needed one. I needed something that
reminded me of home. I put my change in, pressed the button on the machine, and waited. Nothing happened.

“Goddammit,” I growled.

I tried again: nothing. The Whatchamacallit, encased in its tan and brown wrapper, hung on its hook, smugly.

“Come
on,
” I groaned. I shook the machine, then kicked it. The candy bar wobbled, but remained in place.
Where was my goddamn Whatchamacallit?!!

“Yo, yo, Outlaw, what’s the problem?” said Josh Paxton, approaching on deceptively quiet, graceful fat-man feet.

“This machine, man!” I pointed at it, outraged, near tears. “It stole my money!”

“Calm down, calm down.” Josh patted me on the back. “Go to sleep, Jesse. You’ll have a candy bar in the morning. I promise.”

I looked at him and nodded. He was right. I was having an episode. It was, after all, only a candy bar. The next morning, I awoke early. Opening my door to the hallway, I was surprised to discover a small pile of assorted sweets scattered right outside my room. Whatchamacallits, Twix, Bonkers, Hubba Bubba Bubble Gum, about ten or fifteen packages of candy in all. Slowly, I walked down the hallway to investigate. The candy machine’s plastic casing was completely shattered and open to the public. I laughed and patted the ruined machine softly. Some punk must have murdered it for me. Now, that’s a real friend.

——

Football remained my principal reason for being alive. Yet for the first time, I was beginning to entertain tiny shreds of doubt in my own ability. In high school, I’d always been the most physically gifted guy on the field at any point in time. Being six foot three and 225 pounds means quite a lot in high school. At RCC, every single player was big. To a man, we were lean, healthy young animals.

My biggest problems arose when we began running the slant, a
defensive lineup designed to help more agile players like myself use raw speed to combat the strength of giant offensive linemen. When you run the slant, instead of hitting the opposing players straight up when they snap the ball, everybody on your line all lunges in one direction. I thought it was a great strategy: if I tried to butt heads with big, fat, tub-of-lard linemen, I’d lose every time, but if we ran the slant, often I’d be past them before they even got their hands off the ground.

The only catch was, I had to be really fast off the line. And for one reason or another, that wasn’t happening.

“What’s up, James?” Coach Meyer asked me after one game.

“What do you mean?”

He stared at me. “Zero sacks tonight. Only a couple tackles. That’s not your typical performance, is it?” He frowned and pointed to my knees. “Are you having issues, son?”

“No,” I said, surprised. I wore a knee brace in every game, but only as a preventative. I’d worn them all throughout high school, to the point that it felt totally natural to me. “I’m fine.”

“Then why aren’t you
coming off the line
?” he snapped.

After staring me down for a few more seconds, Meyer put up his hands in frustration, turned on his heel, and left.

I couldn’t figure out why, but all that week in practice, I was slow off the line. I just couldn’t dig in the way I used to. The other guys had an edge on me. I felt useless.

“Damn, Jesse, you suck,” Anton Jackson said. He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Time to quit, man, don’t you think?”

I racked my brain for reasons for my demise. Maybe it
was
the knee brace? It was technically possible. Maybe it was slowing me down, impeding my natural first step. Perhaps my only recourse was to play without it. It was risky, certainly, but it might be worth it. My head reeling, I walked all over campus. Finally, I headed back to the dorms to change for dinner.

As I returned to my room, I found Josh Paxton slipping a note under my door.

“What the hell are you up to?” I demanded.

“Oh,” Josh said, whirling around to face me. “This ain’t nothing.”

“Bullshit,” I said, annoyed. “What’s on the note?” I pushed past him to pick it up.
“To whom it may concern?”

“I was gonna leave it anonymously,” Josh explained.

“Yeah, I can see that,” I snapped. I read aloud: “To whom it may concern. Your girlfriend is seeing Dan Konte behind your back.”

I stared at the big man. The two of us were alone in the hallway.

“Man, I
wish
you hadn’t come around,” said Josh sadly. “I was trying to leave that anonymously.”

I felt numb. Dan Konte was a teammate of ours, a huge lineman who had a stereotypical lineman dumbness to him. “Should I take this seriously?”

Josh nodded mutely. “Konte told me,” he said, finally.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” Josh said, looking down at the floor. “He said . . . well, he said she’s real sexy.”

I stood there, trying to get a hold on the emotions that were running over me.

Finally, I managed to nod. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s true.”

That next Saturday, for the first time in five years, I played a game without a knee brace.

Trust no one,
I thought.
Fuck ’em all.

My knee felt light. My whole being felt light, in fact. The anger ran in me like a fever, and I absolutely dominated. I got three sacks in the first half.

“Killing!”
Coach Meyer exclaimed at halftime, shaking his fist joyously. “That’s cold-blooded
killing,
son!”

It was true. I was out there murdering everybody. The second half began, and we continued to destroy them. All the life and enthusiasm drained out of the Long Beach City College football team like a warm, gentle piss.
Can’t stop me,
I thought, deeply vindicated.
You might as well go home . . .

“Killing!”
Josh Paxton screamed, as we ran up the score on them, ran their hopes and dreams into the muck.

With four minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, I sacked the quarterback for a final time. Standing up, I raised my arms up to celebrate. It was the best I’d felt on a football field since arriving at Riverside Community Shithole. No adversity could stop me. Not poverty, not drunks in my dorm, not Rhonda, not my deadbeat dad.

Meanwhile, the hugest lineman on the Long Beach team sped toward me.

I am Jesse James,
I thought with satisfaction, my helmet tipped down over my eyes.
And I am headed for greatness!

Just then, the lineman drilled me right in the knee. My pain was so immediate and so intense that I puked in my helmet even before I hit the ground.

“FUGGGHHH!”
I wailed, vomit spraying out of my mouth and coating my chin.

It was a crippling hit. The force of impact folded my leg up completely, until my ankle touched my hip. In a single instant, I realized what had happened. Staring at my leg in disbelief, the adrenaline took over, and I went crazy with rage. I was well beyond livid: I needed instant revenge. But unfortunately, I couldn’t stand up. My knee was totally shattered.

“YOU
MOTHERFUCKERS
!” I screamed, trying to hobble my way toward anyone on their team. Unable to move, in desperation, I heaved my vomit-smeared helmet toward the other coach. “YOU CHEAP FUCKING BASTARD!”

Emergency attendants dashed onto the field and strapped me to a stretcher, dodging my blows as I swung at them. I strained against the taut nylon restraints of the stretcher, tears involuntarily streaming from my eyes. “No. No.”

I was rushed to the hospital, and they performed surgery that night. I don’t remember much of the operation. They knocked me out pretty good for most of it.

But when I woke up that night, I was more afraid than I had ever been in my whole life.

——

I lay in my hospital bed in a white gown, sweating and staring up at the ceiling. My heart was trip-hammering a million beats a minute.

I have to get out of here,
I thought.
I have to leave here.

I tried to propel myself out of my bed but, to my dismay, found I couldn’t move. My leg, packed into a huge fabric splint, felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.

I cannot be here,
I thought. I looked straight up above me, into the faintly glowing fluorescent light fixture. An industrial hospital aroma, part antiseptic, part flower-scented air freshener, surrounded me. The faint yet constant noise of beeping machines emanated from all corners.

Terror gripped me full force, and with a start, I wrenched myself out of my bed and hopped to the floor. Horrible pain stabbed through my knee. I opened the door, and pulling my hospital gown around me, began to inch my way down the hallway.