North Dallas Forty (31 page)

It was 11:30
P.M.
and Maxwell still wasn’t back. He came in a half hour later.

“Bed check?” he asked, stepping inside.

“No. Not yet.”

There was no bed check that night and we fell peacefully to sleep watching John Wayne slaughter the noble redman.

M
AXWELL GOT THE
wake-up call after one ring. He groaned into the mouthpiece and then slammed the receiver back to its cradle.

“What time is it?” I asked, not moving my head from the pillow.

“Eight o’clock. Breakfast at eight-thirty, meeting at nine, nondenominational devotional at nine-thirty, Bullwinkle at ten. See, it all works out for those in the hands of the Lord.”

Maxwell loved Bullwinkle Moose like he was kinfolks, and he worried whenever we played in a different time zone that team activity might be scheduled during “The Bullwinkle Show.”

Seth crawled out of bed coughing and clearing great hunks of sludge from his breathing apparatus. He stumbled into the bathroom while I lay in bed and thought about my dream.

I had dreamt that I was late for the game and the bus had left without me. I couldn’t find the stadium, although I could hear the noises of the game quite clearly. Finally I hitched a ride with Mickey Mantle, who told me Yankee Stadium was a nice place to visit, but he wouldn’t want to live there. He dropped me at the stadium and disappeared. I started down the tunnel to the dressing rooms. The winding passages got very dark and I began to have difficulty keeping my eyes open. There were rats and spiders everywhere, but I could only glimpse them. Everything was dark and blurry. I kept running into giant spider webs, knocking hairy yellow-and-black spiders onto the back of my neck.

Then suddenly I was naked and standing in the dugout. The stadium was full and the game was in progress. I could see Rufus Brown, our clubhouse attendant, waving me to the other side of the field. He had my equipment and uniform. I started across the field and got caught up in the game. I was still naked. Maxwell threw me a pass but I wouldn’t take my hands from covering myself. I was agonizingly embarrassed. The ball bounced off my face, breaking my nose. I could breathe again. I ground my jaw so hard from frustration and fear that all my teeth broke off. Then the tape around my thigh unwound and my leg fell off. I had the ball and I was crawling naked toward the end zone, still trying to hide by hugging my stomach to the ground. Then B.A. took me out of the game and told me to quit fooling around and made me sit alone on the bench. I was still naked and my nose was bleeding. Everyone was looking at me... .

“Come on, poot,” Maxwell said, toweling off his freshly shaven face.

I jumped quickly out of bed and pulled on my pants.

“B.A. said we could wear turtlenecks, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, but no love beads.” He held one arm crooked over his head as he rolled on copious amounts of deodorant. It seemed peculiar, in light of the day’s schedule.

The bulletin in the elevator listed Empire Rooms I and II as the locations for our meeting, pregame breakfast, and devotional. The rooms would also be used for much of the simple ankle and knee taping.

“MMMM ... there’s a delicious smell,” I said, lifting my nose and following it to the entrance of Empire I. “Eggs and analgesic. Just like Momma used to make.”

I stopped at the doorway and checked out the tables set for breakfast. Most of the team was seated, waiting for the food.

Maxwell brushed past me into the room, singing. It was his favorite George Jones song.

“... a man come round today and said he’d haul my things away,

If I didn’t get my payment made by ten ...”

I stood in the entrance and surveyed the two rooms, waiting for Maxwell to choose what table he would grace while he took his pregame coffee and cigarettes. It was an important part of his game plan to choose the right table at which to smoke and drink coffee, tell jokes, and generally pump up the frightened men around him. The players he selected each Sunday were picked according to criteria known only to himself. We often split up at pregame meals because of my unpopularity with some of the men Maxwell chose.

The partition between I and II had been pushed back and the six breakfast tables were crowded into the front of Empire I. Near the partition several players in shirt sleeves and undershorts waited their turns to be taped.

My stomach began to churn as the endocrine glands redistributed vital juices for the coming contest. I yawned and stretched, suddenly feeling very tired, the first sign of nervous fear.

In Empire II, chairs, a blackboard, and B.A.’s ever-present portable podium were set up for the last-minute strategy review and the nondenominational team devotional.

Maxwell sat down with Jo Bob Williams, Tony Douglas, O.W. Meadows, and a couple of others. I walked to the nearest table and joined several blacks, including Delma Huddle and the wayward running back Thomas Richardson.

“Hey, Bubba,” Huddle said, holding out his palm to be slapped. I obliged and the cold wetness of our palms made a soggy pop.

He was wearing a white silk shirt monogrammed on the cuff, a wide green tie, a light green cashmere coat, and boxer shorts. No shoes. No pants.

“Hey, man,” he yelled at a rookie waiting by the partition for his turn to be taped. “I’m in front of you and don’t let nobody in. Get me?” The rookie waved and nodded.

“How you feeling?” I asked Huddle, as I stood behind him to knead the muscles at the base of his neck. “Ready?”

“Yeah, Bubba. How ’bout you?” He reached back and tried to grab my balls. I jumped and he roared his high-pitched bursting laugh.

“I was ready there for a minute,” I said, brushing my hand across the top of his woolly head and sitting down. My knee banged against a table leg and water spilled out of one of the metal pitchers.

“You ain’t lettin’ the Man get you down?”

I shook my head, a silent lie.

“Just settle down.” Huddle smiled but his eyes remained serious. “How’s the leg?”

“Feeling better,” I reported, squeezing the quadricep of my right leg absently. “Gets to feeling too good they’ll want to cut it off.”

Huddle laughed again in his peculiar high-pitched giggle.

A heavyset waitress in a dirty white smock set a plate of scrambled eggs and steaks in the middle of our table. The traditional pregame meal was precooked steak and powdered eggs, proven to be among the worst foods a man can put in his stomach before extensive physical activity. They just lie there and putrefy, pregame fear having shifted the blood from the stomach to other parts of the body.

“Look at that, Bubba,” Huddle said, pointing to a plate of food. The scrambled eggs were a light green. Hotel kitchens put food coloring in the powdered eggs to make them look yellow. Green isn’t too far removed on the color spectrum. In Pittsburgh, the hotel dyed our eggs so yellow that Huddle donned sunglasses to eat them.

The sweating waitress delivered the green eggs to each table, receiving treatment at the hands of Jo Bob and others similar to the harassing served up to the bus driver on the way in from the airport.

“Hey, lady,” Jo Bob yelled, “was the chicken ready to lay these or did you go in after ’em? They don’t look ripe to me.”

The waitress kept her jaws clenched but moved her lips silently. Every so often she paused to wipe rivulets of sweat from her nose and forehead.

“Don’t sweat in the scrambled eggs. Momma,” Jo Bob sang out, stringing the words together like a song title. Several people across the room laughed.

When the last plate of eggs was deposited, there were murmurs and grumblings, but shortly the emerald eggs were consumed. They would lie quietly until the body could get around to digesting them. Or they would sit uneasily waiting for that incredibly tense moment just before game time when they would spout all over the locker room floor and any bystanders.

It was 9
A.M.
I took the first of my day’s dosage of codeine. I would take another at eleven and a third just before game time. Huddle watched me swallow the pills.

“Codeine?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Doesn’t it make you sleepy?” Huddle asked, his eyes fixed on my face.

“No. Actually I feel pretty alert, just numb.”

“You remember Jake?” Huddle asked.

I nodded again. Jacob Jacobs was a black running back who had come to Dallas in the middle sixties. When we got him he had been around nine years and was pretty beat up, but he still played hard if not too well.

“Jake used to take codeine and hearts,” Huddle confided. “It made him feel nineteen and untouchable. He’d take five of each. He said it put ten panes of glass between him and everything else. The only thing was it made his eyes burn.”

“Jesus, how strong were the hearts?” Hearts were Dexedrine or Dexamyl tablets.

“He didn’t say. I think they were greenies, but I dunno. I don’ mess with that shit, man.”

“You were born perfect,” I pointed out. “Some of us need to constantly make alterations or we don’t make it.” I smiled and threw my shoulders back. “I guess I’ll have to try Jake’s formula. I may have ten more years in me if I can just master the chemistry of this game.”

“You shore are weird, Bubba.”

“Hey,” I said, the time just registering. “I thought we were meeting at nine.”

“The Man has a special speaker for the devotional,” Huddle explained, “and he can’t get here till nine for breakfast.”

“Who is it?”

Huddle’s face opened into a ridiculous smile.

“Oh shit,” I groaned. “Doctor Tom?”

Huddle toasted me with his coffee cup and nodded.

Doctor Tom Bennett was an enigmatic figure who had materialized in our training camp three years ago and had been haunting me ever since. Nattily dressed in cardigan sweaters and duck-billed golf hats he wandered around the dorm and was everybody’s pal. He was a Doctor of Divinity and B.A. had invited him to address a team meeting on the miracles of God, Christ, salvation, and faith.

Using himself as an example, Doctor Tom explained the pitfalls of a lack of faith in the power of the Lord. He recounted how during his early ministry his modicum of faith caused him to be saddled with a tiny worthless congregation in northern Washington. Doctor Tom soon realized that to make it big he needed greater faith. He immediately got some. Rewards weren’t long in coming. Soon our Doctor Tom commanded a large, wealthy congregation in Florida where he successfully led his flock in their struggle for salvation and security in the face of universal cynicism and ever-spiraling inflation. In return Doctor Tom received great personal satisfaction and a small percentage of a large ocean-front real estate deal.

Once a wealthy man, Doctor Tom set out to fulfill the bargain he had made with the Lord. In an even swap with God for salvation and its Puritan ethic ramifications Doctor Tom swore an oath to the Lord Almighty on the blood of the crucified Christ that he would carry the mantle of Christianity without recompense to a congregation that desperately needed his divine guidance. He chose the National Football League.

B.A. and Doctor Tom became fast friends, Doctor Tom wanting to hang around football players and B.A. wanting to hang around God. B.A. took to wearing cardigan sweaters and golf hats and inviting Doctor Tom to give inspirational messages before important contests.

The Doc had tried several times to get me to attend the devotionals. In the first categorical rebuff, I explained there were other places God was needed more than in a hotel in Minneapolis, listening to some pompous fool refer to him as The Big Coach in the Sky. After that Doctor Tom took a chummier approach, directing the talk to young girls and drinking.

I always made it a point to talk as profanely as possible around the Doc. I would raise my eyebrows and wink at him, after making loud senseless denials of anything resembling a God, and I would always point out what a sucker Jesus was.

But in all fairness I must admit the Doc was a pretty good sport and quite fast on his feet. He had rescued me more than once when I was set upon in the middle of my mindless tirade by one or more of the larger and more pious members of the team.

B.A. stood up at the head table, a fragment of green egg in the corner of his mouth, and announced that Doctor Tom’s schedule had required a slight shuffling on our part and that the meeting would begin at nine-thirty-five with the devotional at ten.

I looked over at Maxwell, obviously struggling over the merits of Doctor Tom and the devotional versus the eternal verities of Bullwinkle and His Friends.

At ten o’clock, as the meeting ended, I walked out in my usual negative response to B.A.’s invitation “to those who would like to stay and hear the message.” I gave the Doc a smile and a short wave as I crossed in front of the portable podium. Maxwell fell into step next to me.

“Jesus,” Maxwell moaned, once we were in the hallway, “he really looked pissed.”

“He’ll probably let Art Hartman lead the Lord’s Prayer. First, loss of grace, next, loss of position. It’s a universal pattern, that’s why the Commies are doomed.”

Seth Maxwell walked to the elevator, his head down. “Why do I punish myself like this?” he asked himself over and over.

After “The Bullwinkle Show” I packed up, grabbed my record player, and caught a cab to the stadium. Maxwell stayed in the room and read the Sunday paper. He would ride out on the team bus at eleven thirty.

Because of serious injuries and the complexity of their treatment, nine players, myself included, were required to arrive at the stadium early so the trainers and team doctors could have enough time to effect repairs. A tenth player, Gino Machado, recently acquired from the Rams, came out early just to take his amphetamines and “get ready to kick ass.” Machado would sit by his locker, his legs shaking uncontrollably from the speed surging through his brain, and talk like a top-forty disc jockey to anyone within earshot. I spent hours listening to him describe sex acts fist fights, and ball games. His lips were white from constant nervous licking, his mouth stretched open from time to time in a grotesque, compulsive yawn, and his eyes rolled while he clenched and unclenched his fists. Every now and then, gripping his shoulder with his hands, he would hug himself and bend double as if trying to slow himself down. In the early season Texas heat the trainers often had to pack Machado in ice after a game to cool down his incredibly overheated body.