Life's Work (3 page)

"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 wellrounded 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 no where 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 a 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.
 
 

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 and 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?"

"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-ofa-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?"

"Nope."

"Beer!" Bluerock said with enormous satisfaction. "Not Coke or Gatorade, but beer! Do you know how that felt, sport? I was just a kid, twenty-one years old. And up till then, nobody'd done anything but tell me what not to do. I get to Canada, run through my first workout, and there's a cold bottle of beer waiting for me when it's over -just like I'd done a day's work! 'Blue,' I said to myself, 'you finally made it. You're finally a man.' And that's the way it felt, too."

Bluerock leaned back in the seat, shutting his eyes and hugging the bottle to his chest. "Good story, huh?" he said.

"Great story," I said.

He laughed. "Where are we? Are we in town yet?"

"Not quite."

"Well, wake me when we get there. I want to go to the Waterhole. See if I can find Wild Bill."

For a second I couldn't place the name. "You mean Parks?" I said.

"Yeah," he said. "Let's go talk to Wild Bill. I miss the son-of-a-bitch."
 
 

The Waterhole was one of a number of nightclubs located on Front Street, near the Stadium. Like the others, it catered to blue-collar money. Plumbers, carpenters, hard hats. Guys who didn't mind spending the extra dollar for a drink or a toot if they got their vanities patted down by good-looking women in leotards and got to rub shoulders with jocks. A lot of the players hung out there during the season. After all, they were blue-collar workers too. They were suckers for the same thin mix of class and cleavage. Plus, they got their backs slapped, got their drinks taken care of, and got their choice of the girls who worked there. It didn't seem like Otto Bluerock's kind of place. It certainly wasn't mine. But Bill Parks apparently liked it there, so that's where we went.

I parked the Pinto in a little lot underneath the L&N bridge, and Bluerock and I stumbled out of the car and up to the club. From the outside the Waterhole looked like a collision between a family restaurant and a riverboat. Half of it was quaint white brick house, with trellises and vines snaking up its sides. The other half was scuppered, portholed, streamlined metal.

"It's like a theme park without a theme," I said.

Bluerock laughed and said, "Oh, it's got a theme, all right. Wait till you get inside."

There was a canopied entryway in front of the brick part, with a doorman standing beneath it. He had on red livery and a black billycock hat, but inside the uniform he was the same sleazy guy who stands beside the sandwich sign yelling, "Girls, girls, girls!"

"Where's Bill?" Bluerock roared at him.

The doorman laughed nervously. "Bill who?"

"'Bill who?'" Bluerock mocked. "Bill Parks, you weasel-faced bastard."

"I haven't seen him, sir," the doorman said. "He hasn't been around in several months."

"Balls!" Bluerock said, and pushed past him through a metalized swinging door into the club.

The doorman, who'd been intimidated by Bluerock's size and bulldog face, wasn't so intimidated by me. "We don't like noisy drunks around here," he said.

"Tell
him
, " I said.

"You tell
him
," the doorman said in a nasty voice. "We run a nice clean place."

"Sure, you do," I said.

I followed Bluerock through the door into the nightclub. It was so dark inside that I had to stand still for a moment, eyes shut, in order to dark-adapt, and at that, the only things I could make out clearly were the burnished hardwood dance floor and the bar, which was glowing like an aquarium on the far side of the room. I walked toward it, feeling my way with my hands and brushing into a few startled customers sitting at the tables scattered around the dance floor. As soon as I got close enough, I grabbed for the bar, sat down on a chrome stool, and looked around for Otto. It was hard to believe, considering his size, but Bluerock had vanished. I started to get up again when they turned the music on -a blast of Prince that hit me like a feather boa with a length of lead pipe in it and knocked me right back onto the stool. As soon as the noise started, couples began to file onto the dance floor. Someone turned on the strobes and lasers. Within a few seconds, all I could see was a tangle of flashlit limbs and leering faces. I turned back to the bar, where a big bartender in a black bow tie, diamond vest, and white shirt with garters on the puffed-up sleeves leaned over to get my order. I couldn't quite figure out how the western outfit fit in with the hi-tech look of the rest of the club. I thought maybe it was the Waterhole's bow to tradition, like that first dollar bill framed above the bar. The music was so loud that the bartender couldn't hear me when I said, "Scotch." He moved his mouth again and made a questioning face.

"He wants to know what you want to drink," someone said close to my ear.

I looked around. A pretty blond in a black tube top, designer jeans, and red pumps had seated herself on the stool beside me.

"I know what he wants," I yelled at her. "I just can't make him understand."

"Tell me!" she shouted back, pointing to her chest.

I laughed. "Scotch up."

"Scotch up," she shouted at the bartender, who nodded serenely and walked away.

"I'll be damned," I said.

The girl grinned. She was very pretty and very young -no more than twenty-one or twenty-two- with short, shaggy ash-blond hair cut in a punk style, and a gamine's angular hollow-cheeked face. She'd made up heavily, mouth as red as cut strawberries and eyes blackened with mascara. Two spots of rouge glowed on either cheek, giving her a pert and vaguely doll-like look. It was hard to tell over the roar, but her voice had sounded Kentuckian.

"Thanks for the help," I said to her.

She gestured casually. "No big deal."

"What are you drinking?"

She picked up a glass of what looked like a gin and tonic and swirled it around.

"You want another?" I said.

She smiled like a belle. "Thank you, sir," she said, and almost curtsied.

I yelled at the bartender, and we went through the same ridiculous charade, until the girl stepped in and translated for us again.

"They should hire you to do this for a living," I shouted at her when the bartender had gone.

"They do," she said with a wink.

"So it's like that, is it?" I said.

"Sometimes. Not always." She gave me a coy look. "What's your name?"