North Dallas Forty (23 page)

The contest was an invention of Carl Jones, the disc jockey, and it involved sending Uncle Billy Bunk a letter of twenty-five words or less picking your choice for the outstanding player of the next game and describing his future acts of glory. The letter that came closest to predicting what actually happened on Sunday won five free long-playing records.

“What did she write?”

I felt sorry for Claridge. His mother was a divorcee who had moved to Dallas when Claridge joined the club and would suffer a nervous collapse if she didn’t talk to her “baby” at least once a day. She usually called the practice field. Claridge would turn red with rage at the falsetto cry, “Baby, your mommy’s on the phone,” and storm over to plead with her to leave him alone.

“I’m not saying anything, man,” Huddle said. “If he don’t know, I ain’t gonna be the one to start it.”

Delma Huddle and Alan Claridge had developed a solid friendship grounded in their respect for one another as great athletes and during practice they spent a lot of time together joking and laughing. Some of the players were contemptuous of the mixed friendship and referred to Claridge as being “queer for the nigger.”

The importance of Claridge and Huddle to the team far outweighed any status held by their antagonist and thus kept the harassment from becoming more than an infrequent attempt by Meadows or Jo Bob to strike out in paranoia and frustration at something beyond their comprehension.

One time in the sauna I was listening to a conversation between Jo Bob, Tony Douglas the middle linebacker, O.W. Meadows, and a couple of others. Larry Costello was in his customary seat counting the sweat drops that plummeted off his nose. The conversation had wandered from black players asking white wives to dance at team parties to the infamous friendship. Meadows had just threatened to beat the shit out of Thomas Richardson if he ever spoke to his wife again.

“She knew better’n to tell me that black cocksucker had ast her to dance,” the furious lineman had said. “I’d a killed the son of a bitch right there.”

I sat silently in the heat, restraining any objections, feeling that a little touch of bigotry was better than massive contusions.

“I don’t blame Huddle,” Jo Bob said, commenting on Huddle and Claridge’s friendship and antics. “I’d like to hang around with white guys too.”

“Don’t worry, Jo Bob,” I said, unable to contain myself any longer, “someday you might get to.”

Everything flashed white as Jo Bob’s fist hit me behind the right ear and my head bounced off the cedar wall. I gripped my head with both hands, fighting to stay conscious. I squeezed my eyes shut against the pain. I kept them closed and dropped my head on my chest. The pain was insufferable. When I could move, I blindly pulled myself to my feet and started for Jo Bob; his foot caught me in the middle of the chest, sending me ass first into the door. Fortunately the door latch gave before my backbone did and I went sprawling into the hallway. I got back to my feet, stumbled to my locker, and threw up all over the blue carpet and my new kangaroo Pumas.

An ache settled behind my eyes that took several days to subside. Later that day I went to the trainers, saying I had taken a forearm in a blocking drill. When they assured me I wasn’t going blind I considered myself lucky and took an oath to keep my mouth shut around people I didn’t agree with. A pledge I kept until quite recently.

“Turn over.” Eddie Rand slapped me on the ass to accent his injunction. I peeled myself up from the table top. My back had stuck to the vinyl.

Huddle, who had stopped massaging my foot, moved around to the head of the table. He locked his hands behind my neck and tried to pull my face toward his elastic-encased crotch; he was simultaneously making fucking motions with his hips.

I tightened my neck in resistance. A sharp ache at the base of my skull reminded me I was probably still a little high on mescaline. I was high on something all the time—codeine, booze, grass, speed, fear; in fact, I doubt that during a season I was ever in a normal state of mind, if there is such a thing as normal. After the season I went through withdrawal, sweating and walking most of the night for weeks, not really calming down until mid-March.

“Come on,” Huddle pleaded, increasing the pressure on my neck.

“If I do, you won’t respect me,” I said, pulling back.

“Yes I will, honey,” he replied. “I’ll respect you more.”

“Goddammit, Delma,” Rand’s voice cut into the game. “If there ain’t nothing wrong with you, get the hell outta here.”

“I’m trying to get what’s wrong with me fixed right now,” Huddle answered, making an exaggerated pelvic thrust at my face.

“You can get three years in this country for sodomy, boy,” Seth Maxwell said, walking up to the table naked except for a towel hanging from his shoulder. He was the only man allowed in the training room without a clean jock. Nobody seemed to know why.

“More than that if you’re a spade,” I added.

The huge, pale, pimply cheeks of Maxwell’s ass blotted out everything as he sat down next to my face and began talking to Huddle.

“Hey, Delma,” Maxwell asked, “you gettin’ any pussy?”

“Not like you, Bubba.”

“Why, Delma,” Maxwell continued, “if I had your women, I’d throw mine away. They all like them big dicks you guys got.” Maxwell meant no offense.

Huddle fielded the remark with an ease that comes from a lifetime of reacting to unintentional insults.

“Bubba,” Huddle responded, “if I had your dick, I’d throw mine away.”

Laughing loudly at his own remark, Huddle tried to change the tenor of the conversation. I did it for him.

“Maxwell, you shithead,” I said, “get your ass outta my face.”

Maxwell took little notice of my remark. Huddle used it to escape out the door from the anxiety caused by people he liked but didn’t understand, taking nothing with him but the slight pleasure that comes of casual human interaction.

Art Hartman walked in clothed in a clean supporter and T-shirt with
wonder warthog
silk-screened across the chest.

“Hey, guy,” he said to Maxwell, putting his arms around Seth and kissing him lightly on the neck, “did you see what that Braniff stock did today?”

Maxwell nodded, grabbing the bicep of Hartman’s passing arm with both hands. They barely circled the muscle.

“Goddam,” Maxwell exclaimed to me. “Lookit that.”

“Clean living and plenty of exercise, guy,” Hartman said, flexing the muscle tight. “And an occasional piece of strange.”

“The kid may be able to throw further than ol’ Seth,” Maxwell said, winking at me, “but championships are won in bedrooms and bars. Everybody plays their way into this league but mos’ guys fuck and drink their way out.”

Maxwell stood up and the two men remained side by side with their arms around each other’s waists. The training room was beginning to fill, as one by one the rest of the team began to arrive for the day’s work.

“If you show Seth how to add ten yards to his deep passes,” I said to Hartman, “maybe he’ll rescue you from the dangers of premature ejaculation.”

Seth and Hartman looked at each other quizzically, then frowned at me and unwound their arms. Maxwell slugged Art lightly on the arm as he walked over and climbed into a whirlpool, disappearing up to his neck.

“Everybody’s reading that sheet Richardson put on the board,” Maxwell said to me, his eyes still on his competition sitting in the whirlpool. His tone was grave and confidential.

“Johnson ripped it down to show to B.A. He’s certain you put it up.”

Jim Johnson, the defensive coach, had never forgiven me for attending practice in a false beard, and he strongly resented my seemingly casual approach to a man’s game. His ten years as a marine corps officer were not a point in my favor.

“What the fuck for?” I was amazed anyone had taken the time to read the paper.

“I dunno,” Maxwell continued, “but he was really pissed.”

“Jesus Christ. I—”

Delma Huddle stuck his grinning black head in the training room door. “I hate niggers,” he screamed and was gone.

“Me too,” I yelled back at the empty doorway.

“Stand up,” Rand ordered, the rubdown finished.

I groaned as I got to my knees and pushed myself upright, the soles of my feet sinking unsteadily into the foam. The trainer set two elastic bandages on the table.

“Well,” I said to Maxwell, who was picking his nose and watching Hartman in the whirlpool, “I didn’t put it there, so I ain’t gonna worry about it. Besides, what’s the fucking problem?”

“I dunno,” Maxwell answered, withdrawing his finger from the recesses of his nose and wiping it on the towel. “I’m jest passin’ through on a load of turkeys.” He turned and headed for the door.

“I didn’t do anything,” I hollered after him.

“What about my beer?” Rand interjected. “I don’t know why I’m fixin’ your legs.”

“You ain’t fixing them.”

“Shut up and tell me how that feels.”

The trainer encased both my legs in elastic tape and Ace Bandages from above my knees to my hips. He had crisscrossed the wraps around my waist so they would not slide down. I looked like a nude gunfighter. I sat down and extended my legs out over the end of the table, curling my toes back, tightening the tendons and ligaments in my ankles.

Slapping Vaseline onto the heels of both feet, Rand wound gauze around the feet and ankles and began to tape with a rote skill that comes from taping eighty ankles a day, six days a week, for sixteen years.

The trainers were responsible for the overall health of all player personnel. The problem was that their opinions carried little weight with management. The medical problems were constantly overruled by front-office tactical decisions, and there was no place for professional integrity. Each Sunday was its own problem that could only be solved satisfactorily by winning. If the trainers, highly qualified physical therapists, didn’t finally bring their medical opinions into agreement with the current tactical needs of management, they would shortly find themselves administering enemas in the geriatrics ward at Parkland Hospital. As a result, a player who the trainers thought needed rest or even surgery often found himself shot full of Novocain facing a grinning Deacon Jones and the player was given the chance to exhibit the most desirable of traits—the ability to endure pain.

Trainers were technicians, line workers, who repaired broken club property as it was conveyed slowly, but most certainly, to the scrap heap. The player who sat momentarily on the blue-padded tables to get taped, shot, rubbed, doped, shocked, burned, boiled, was numbed and sometimes, but not often, healed. Don’t worry about health; after all the body belongs to the club. Deal in pain thresholds and analgesics, amphetamines and anesthesia. Short circuit that bothersome equipment that communicates pain, numb it, bind it, but get the property back to work. Pain is nothing more than the property perceiving the disintegration of its parts. Teach it the difference between pain and injury. If it is felt by the property it is pain. If it is felt by the corporation it is injury.

“Do you wanna pad on this?” Rand was thunking the lump on my ankles that had permanently put me in cowboy boots.

I shook my head and wondered if the Japanese would replace trainers as they had replaced electronics workers.

“How about the knee?”

“Naw, it feels fine,” I lied, adding more misinformation to the company’s diagnostic bank. “I’ll just wear an elastic sleeve.”

“Fingers okay?”

I held up and flexed the two sausages that I had dislocated yesterday. They were still taped together.

“Back?” He continued down the list. “Do you wanna pad on it?”

“Naw.” I didn’t want to arouse interest by continuing to protect the smashed muscles and fractured short ribs. I would be careful in practice and try not to get hit. For games I would discreetly put the pad on myself.

“B-12 shot?”

“Yeah. Gimme two.”

The needle hit me in the shoulder and I watched the red fluid disappear into my bicep. I immediately felt healthier.

“You better get a muscle-relaxant shot after workout,” Rand ordered.

“Okay.” I grimaced at the thought. Muscle-relaxant shots were like being bayoneted in the ass. But they kept my hamstrings and back from being crippling and I usually slept better on the nights I took them.

I walked back to my locker feeling that if the tape came loose I would just ooze out onto the floor.

John Wilson sat at the next locker and drank a twenty-cent canned soft drink from the machine that netted the equipment man 45 per cent. I took the can from him and washed down another Number Four codeine. I spread a towel on the floor and lay with my head inside my locker to wait for the meeting and steep in the heat of the analgesic.

I had slept some, had just gotten up, and was on the phone to Joanne, making plans to meet in New York. She was riding up with Emmett Hunter on the team plane.

Jim Johnson stepped in from the hall and called the meeting ten minutes early.

Hanging up without waiting for her good-bye, I bolted to my locker for my playbook and a pair of sweatpants. I raced down the hall.

Maxwell had saved me a seat and I quietly slid into the molded plastic cup and answered roll call. Jim Johnson finished the roll, glared at me momentarily, and then stepped away from the portable podium to make room for B.A. The coach was holding Richardson’s quotation in his hand. Maxwell nudged me in the ribs.

“It’s your ass,” he grinned.

“I don’t believe this,” I mumbled.

“Did you say something?” B.A. stood at the podium looking down at me, without expression. His voice was iced.

“No, sir, just talking to myself.”

“Maybe we would all like to hear what you’ve got to say,” he pressed, his eyes glazed over and dead. I could feel the flush of guilt and anger rush into my face. My eyebrows pulled together and my mouth twitched.

God, I thought, now even I think I’m guilty.

“Did you say something else?”

“No, sir.” I had tried to hit a note of humility and submission without sliding over into outright groveling. Instead I sounded guilty and pissed off.