North Dallas Forty (12 page)

“I thought I would dress later,” Joanne said as she opened her door. “I was hoping we might fuck right now.”

“Are you sure there’s no good TV?” I walked past her to the wrought-iron stairs that lead to the bedroom loft.

Screwing Joanne was no easy matter. Being an even six foot, and big-boned, she wasn’t easy to maneuver around the bed. She had a good shape but there was just so much of it Also, she had long, dark brown hair that fell below her hips. We were constantly getting tangled up in it. Frequently I would be shaken from some minor perversion by her screams as, in a move to gain some sensual advantage, I would accidentally kneel on her hair. The violence resulting when bodies of our respective sizes engaged in the sex act often totally distracted me. I was reminded of the team doctor who said the increased size and speed of professional football players had outdistanced the ability of the body joints to withstand the strain. The same theory seemed to apply to screwing Joanne. Part of my consciousness remained detached, watching, lest the sex play get too spirited and I suffer a dislocation or serious sprain. On the night we met she had separated one of my rib cartilages.

Once up in the loft, she stepped out of her gown and lay back on the bed. The covers had already been thrown back; the sheets were bright yellow with huge white flowers, the pillowcases white with yellow flowers. She laid her head in the middle of a daisy; her face, outlined in the bright yellow petals, was flawless. Her nose, jaw, and cheekbones were sharply defined by a prominent but surprisingly delicate bone structure. Her eyes were like dark shadows, hidden under full brows. Making up her eyes was a daily sacrament and I was glad she went to the trouble.

“Don’t hurt me,” I whined as I crawled into bed. I’ve been hurt so much lately.”

“Poor baby.”

“Congratulate me.” Joanne was smoking a cigarette while I rubbed a spot on my right calf that had somehow gotten bruised. “I’m officially engaged.”

“I already heard,” I said, wincing as my fingers dug, trying to loosen the muscle. “You hurt me. I asked you not to hurt me.”

She ignored me and held her left hand at arm’s length, gazing at the empty ring finger. “We’re going to pick out the ring at Neiman’s Thursday.”

Joanne had been dating Emmett Hunter for the past two years. Marriage wasn’t necessarily her goal, but it would suffice.

Three years before, Joanne had moved to Dallas from Denton, where she had attended North Texas State after escaping a stultifying secondary school experience in Childress. Childress was a small town on the west Texas plains, known for its cotton and lack of water. It had rained only twice during Joanne Remington’s four years in high school and her father had gone broke in a bait shop and boat landing on Lake Childress. The lake dried up in 1967.

Joanne had decided to leave Childress her sophomore year in high school, after relinquishing her virginity to keep the starting left halfback of the Fightin’ Bobcats from having sore nuts. After the season he admitted that she had been his second sexual relationship. Her predecessor was his 4-H calf, Muffin. She began to make plans to attend college.

I hadn’t been surprised when Conrad told me about the engagement. Emmett supported her already, though she still kept her job with the airlines, and banked her entire pay check each month. “Well, congratulations,” I said. “When?”

“Oh, not for several months. I told him I wanted to keep the apartment afterward to maintain some independence. He agreed.”

“Foolish man,” I said. I cleared my throat, stretched, and sat back against the headboard. “Got any dope?”

“In the drawer.”

I reached across her stomach to the bedside table. In the drawer a small plastic baggie lay atop the Fightin’ Bobcats Yearbook. I had thumbed through the book before. Joanne had gone through and had neatly snipped out every picture of herself. “Any good?” I nodded toward the baggie that was now on the sheet spread across my lap.

“Emmett got it in L.A. He calls it, and I quote, Dynamite Shit.”

Although Joanne had smoked dope when we first met, she was not what I would call a heavy doper. Nor was Emmett. He smoked to please Joanne and she did it seemingly, to please me. She seldom turned on alone.

The first joint fell to pieces in my hands. I held them out in front of me and turned them over. “These are considered by some,” I said, “the finest hands in the league. God, the irony of it all.”

I finally rolled a bowling-pin-shaped joint. “They burn better this way,” I insisted, lighting up, taking a long drag, and passing to Joanne. We smoked in silence.

The bedroom loft faced out over the two-story living room and its floor-to-ceiling picture window. The view of downtown Dallas, although not awe inspiring (no view of Dallas could inspire awe), was still impressive. I read the lighted message on the north side of the CRH Building. The entire north and south sides of the building contained banks of lights used to spell out messages to the city. Tonight letters twenty stories high spelled out POW, part of a community wide campaign to get involved in the Southeast Asia war. The war ranked third in community importance behind the Texas-Oklahoma Football Weekend and Conrad Hunter’s acquisition of one more good white running back.

I laughed out loud.

“What is it?” Joanne asked.

“The CRH Building. Look at the message.”

“POW?”

“No. P.O.W.”

“So?”

“Well,” I elaborated, “most of the P.O.W.’s are pilots, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, don’t you think it’s weird? I mean, if Conrad didn’t make guidance systems those P.O.W.’s wouldn’t be P.O.W.’s. Other guys might be, but not those particular ones.”

“So?”

“I can see you don’t recognize the cosmic values in all this.”

She gave me a noncomprehensive smile and shook her head.

“I mean, now Conrad and that other guy are trying to fly gifts and food to the same P.O.W.’s. Doesn’t it all strike you as strange?” I looked at her more for effect than response and then continued. undaunted. “Can you imagine some rickshaw magnate trying to fly fish heads and rice to captured North Vietnamese pilots who had just bombed Dallas and Fort Worth?”

“The mind reels.” She yawned, got up, and padded nude to the cabinet that held her stereo and records. She put on the Byrds’
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
and the apartment filled with strains of an old Bob Dylan song.

Emmett had had the stereo cabinet specially made. It ran the width of the loft and served double duty as a railing to keep from falling into the living room. There was another stereo downstairs. Joanne always bought records in pairs, an upstairs and downstairs copy. She had a ten-record-a-week habit.

Getting back into bed, she kissed the head of my shriveled cock.

“Poor baby,” she said.

It always amused me the way she thought of my sex organ as a person. I often wished I could master ventriloquism, just to see the look on her face. I grinned broadly at the thought and suddenly it struck me how good I felt.

“Dynamite Shit,” I said, shaking my head.

“How was practice?” Joanne’s greatest asset was her ability as a confessor.

“The same,” I said. “B.A. called me in again today. We had another one of our classics. He told me I should learn to adjust to sitting on the bench. Can you believe that?”

At a time in life when most men were just beginning to build careers, mine seemed to be coming to a screeching halt. Football was rapidly becoming a dead end.

But everything’s dead end, isn’t it? I realized that one Sunday, lying near the endline with my right foot twisted backward and flopping uselessly, the broken bones poking through the skin. I watched my sock staining red and understood that success comes by accident, and that the same process brings failure. Success is only a matter of opinion. Failure is a cold hard fact. I have had my successes; they were empty and short-lived. But, from all early indications, my failure will be awesome and eternal.

“Why don’t you quit?” Her voice was so matter-of-fact it was irritating.

“What could I do that wouldn’t be the same or worse? Besides, it’s the only thing I’m good at, and goddammit, I’m proud of myself for being good at it.” I looked down at my right knee and picked at the scars. “And shit, Gill isn’t any better than me, just healthier.”

“Let’s get something to drink.” Joanne was up, putting on a pale-blue terrycloth robe that just barely covered her round bottom.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” I said. “I’m gonna roll another joint.”

The second joint resembled a snake that had swallowed a volleyball. I held out my hands again and looked them over slowly. Then I glanced back over my shoulder, reached up deliberately and gathered in an imaginary pass. I turned up-field and outraced Adderly to the end zone, all in ultraslow motion. Flipping the ball behind my back to the official, I headed for the bench. The crowd was still roaring in my ears as I lit the joint, pulled on my Levi’s, and limped down the stairs. My calf was still tender.

“... T
HAT WAS OL’
rascal, Johnny Rivers.” The clock radio had clicked on. The “Uncle Billy Bunk Show” was in progress. The show’s format featured an imaginary ninety-year-old rancher named Uncle Billy Bunk and his nephew Carl. Carl Jones, a local disc jockey, did both characters.

“Uncle Billy, tell me, how is your new car running?”

“Muffler trouble. Ol’ Billy’s having muffler trouble.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Do? Why I’m gonna take it down to them boys at Dickie Don’s Muffler Repair at Lemmon and Cedar Springs. Those fellas’ll fix ever’ thing.”

“Fuck you, Billy.” I reached under the bed where Joanne hid the radio and turned it off. I had met Carl Jones about a year ago. He was an avid football fan and had heaped such praise on me it had felt like a homosexual experience. Jones and his wife Donna Mae had come into Casa Dominguez where Thomas Richardson and I and our dates were eating Mexican food. Introductions led to the Joneses’ joining our party. It was a disaster.

Donna Mae Jones was from Jackson, Mississippi, and was delighted to meet Thomas, who was from Hattiesburg.

“Imagine, comin’ all the way from Jackson tah Dallas,” she had said. Her accent was high-pitched but syrupy. “An’ sittin’ down tah dinnah with ah nigrah from mah own home state.”

I immediately ordered more wine, which I poured quickly down on top of two marijuana cookies I had eaten earlier. I hurriedly raced the evening to oblivion. The clearest memory of the night was Richardson’s eyes filled with vacant despair as Donna Mae loudly denied ever being prejudiced against “nigrahs.”

“Why I don’t even mind sittin’ next tah one at dinnah,” she had confided. “Although I sure hope mah po’ granmommah don’ find out.”

“You know, Donna Mae,” Richardson’s date, a tall blonde stewardess who flew back and forth to Houston, finally said, “I don’t like eatin’ with nigras at all.” She leaned forward into Donna Mae’s face. “But I sure do like to suck their cocks.”

Donna Mae turned red and lurched backward as if hands had crabbed her throat and were slowly throttling her. She tried to leap to her feet but hit her knee solidly against the table. Carl had to carry her screaming out of the restaurant.

“Fuck you, Billy,” I repeated. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

I moved to get out of bed. The pain in my legs and back brought me sharply awake.

“Motherfucker,” I groaned.

Usually I woke up five or ten times during the night in response to various aches and pains, but last night I had been so stoned I slept in the same position all night. I was like leather dried in the sun. My head felt like someone had been squeezing it all night. Rolling off the bed, I limped, bent over, into the bathroom and started filling the tub.

When I stepped into the full tub I noticed my right foot had gone to sleep. All up the back of my leg and into my ass I felt the needles and pins. I made a mental note to find out what it was, but even if I remembered, which was doubtful, it wasn’t the kind of symptom that elicited much response from the trainers or team doctor.

Joanne walked into the bathroom with a cup of coffee and the morning paper.

“There’s an article about you in the paper,” she said. “They call you the team funnyman.”

“I wonder if they have a special room for that in Canton? Pro Football’s Greatest Funnymen. Me and Dick Butkus. It’s probably down the hall from the Pete Rozelle Humanitarianism Awards.”

I took the paper and scanned the article, eyes acutely sensitive to the peculiar shape of my name. It was all very silly and seeing myself quoted incorrectly in print embarrassed me. Sportswriters were such assholes. They didn’t know shit and acted as if they understood a game far more complex in emotion and technical skills than they had the ability to comprehend. They couldn’t even transcribe my jokes correctly. That is why they were sportswriters, because they didn’t know shit about anything.

The front page of the paper was much more interesting and enlightening. There were incredible satirical chronicles of the rather frightening direction of the technomilitary complex that was trying to be America. The Dallas newspapers had become almost camp. The banner headline read:
CIA BELIEVES VIET CONG TRYING TO EMBARRASS U.S.
It seemed a safe assumption. Two other stories dealt with Texas justice handed down scant feet from the main settings of the Kennedy-Oswald-Ruby drama. The first headline announced a several-hundred-year prison sentence for possession of marijuana. The other concerned a seven-year probation handed to a narcotics agent for the kidnapping, sodomy assault, and murder with malice of his twenty-two-year-old airline stewardess girlfriend. In front of witnesses. Airline stewardesses always seemed to get the short end of the stick. On the other hand, narcotics agents didn’t seem to have it as good anymore. Either way, the doper would be eligible for parole sometime around the turn of the century. So the picture really wasn’t as black as my early morning depression and paranoia tended to paint it. Besides, it was a price one had to pay to live in Dallas at the apex of the American social evolutionary cycle.