Life Its Ownself (29 page)

"My first broadcast, the Green Bay-Washington game? You had a defensive-holding call that was a beauty."

"They held up the tight end."

"It was a God-damn quarterback sneak!"

"Could have been a quick-out."

I finished my drink.

"Charlie, how come every bettor I've ever known thinks the zebras do business?"

"Well, they have to blame somebody when they lose. The dumb guys have been robbing the smart guys for years, Billy Clyde."

"I'm a little drunk, Charlie, or I wouldn't say this to you, but the fucking zebras sure turn a lot of games around."

He said, "You've got it wrong. We don't turn the games around. Players turn the games around by trying to take advantage of the rules. All we do is catch 'em."

I stood up.

"Good to meet you," I said to Roy, Wayne, and Hank.

They glanced at me hastily. Their eyes then returned to the stage, where Kim Cooze was now totally nude. She had discarded her G-string and pasties and was sensually rubbing her whup against a lifesize cardboard statue of Jesus.

Charlie Teasdale had seen the act before, I presumed. He kept facing me.

He said, "Billy Clyde, I'm willing to lay my knowledge and my judgment on the line every time I go out on the field. If I know I'm right, they can burn the stadium down and I won't care. Part of the pleasure of officiating is being able to walk off the field knowing you were right."

Back at the bar, I reported to Shake that Charlie had made a good case for his integrity.

"So does Kim," Shake said.

Kim's routine ended as she faked an orgasm with the statue. Charlie and the homebuilders left.

It was a good hour before Kim, wearing a peasant blouse, jeans, and boots, came walking past the bar and discovered Shake and me standing there. Jim Tom was still with us, but then again, he wasn't. He was whispering sincerities to a Campfire Girl named Kelly Ann.

Kim squealed when she saw us. She smothered us with hugs and kisses and demanded that we remain silent for a moment while she said a prayer, thanking God for sending us back to The Blessed Virgin.

"Have you heard what's happened to me?" Kim said to Shake excitedly. "
Playboy
took my picture! It's going to be in the magazine with your story!"

"I saw Charlie here," Shake said.

"Every other night," Kim said. "I was just talking to him outside in the car. He won't say what game he's working next week. Claims he doesn't know yet. I said, Well, when you find out, there's an apartment over on Hulen I sure would like to buy. One more game might do it."

"Thinking about settling down in Fort Worth, are you?" I said.

"The Lord wouldn't want me to leave at a time like this."

Shake asked if there was anything new happening to her show-biz career.

"Yes!" she chimed. "The photographer who took my picture for
Playboy
? He said after the issue came out, he bet he could sell a whole layout on me to
Hustler
."

"The literary quarterly," said Shake. "I've heard of it."

"I can work here as long as I want to," said Kim. "After the joint gets all that publicity, they'll pay anything to keep me. Listen, I've got two more gigs tonight. What do y'all want to do later?"

Shake and I traded looks.

I said, "We have a business meeting in the morning, Kim. I'm going Dixie."

"So am I," said Shake.

"We could have a nice party," Kim said.

"Another time," Shake said.

"I can get Brandy to go with us," Kim suggested. "You remember Brandy, don't you, Billy Clyde? She went with your friend?"

"Brandy's a great American," I said.

Kim said, "She's a wise-mouth little thing, but I pray for her, and I've never heard any complaints about her athletic ability."

Shake said we really had to leave. Kim wouldn't let us pay the bar check. She hugged and kissed us again, and did something with each of our hands to remind us of her 44s, not that it had been necessary

I interrupted Jim Tom to see if he was interested in going with us. He wasn't.

"This here's Kelly Ann," Jim Tom said, introducing us to the Campfire Girl, who was about eighteen, a sleaze-style lookalike for Sandi, the TCU cheerleader.

Kelly Ann fished around in her handbag, came up with a black capsule, and chased it down with a shot of tequila.

Jim Tom grinned at us. "Kelly Ann's twelve but she's got the body of a nine-year-old."

"Why don't you swallow my farts?" Kelly Ann said to

him.

Jim Tom fell against the bar rail. "Zing went the strings of my heart," he said.

Shake and I said goodnight to the lovebirds and went to get some eggs and talk about a swami.

Through the two glass walls of Big Ed's office on the eighth floor of the Bookman Oil & Gas building, you could almost see every stump, scorpion, and mesquite tree in West Texas.

On the two wood-paneled walls of the office, you could see a dozen oil paintings of the drilling rigs and producing pumps that had brought immense wealth to Big Ed.

Some of those holes had been dug by the grandfather Barbara Jane had never known—except through legend. "Deep Salt" Bookman was a rowdy old West Texas wildcatter who earned his nickname by drilling deeper and hitting more saltwater than just about anybody before he finally got lucky and hit oil.

"Deep Salt" Bookman wasn't in the same league with the greats of the Texas oil bidness. He had never been as revered as Cap Lucas, who hit Spindletop, or Mike Benedum, who brought in the Pecos pool, or Dad Joiner, who discovered the East Texas field when he drilled the Daisy Bradford No. 3. But "Deep Salt" had made and lost three fortunes in the Twenties before anyone had ever heard of Haroldson Lafayette Hunt or Sid Richardson.

Barb's granddaddy had given Big Ed a leg up in the bidness, which was enough production to see him through college and buy him a '36 Ford roadster. But it was to Big Ed's credit that he had taken big rich on his own.

Big Ed Bookman, who had lettered as an end at TCU— he was 6-2 and that was considered big in those days— actually amounted to more than a big voice and a drawl he liked to exaggerate when he was in the company of pretentious Easterners. He held a degree in geology from TCU and he had gone through law school at the University of Texas.

And he had fought a war. Big Ed had flown P-38's in the Fifth Air Force during World War II. He had been a highly decorated fighter pilot who had come out of the Air Corps as a twenty-four-year-old combat major. He had been in the air battle over the Philippines in January of '45 when his friend Tommy McGuire, America's second top ace, had been shot down and killed. Big Ed's war experiences alone would have made him a superpatriot.

Big Ed had come home from the war and started looking for oil. He had found Big Barb first—Barbara Jane Bender, a pretty girl from a nice, middle-income family in Fort Worth.

Barbara Jane's mother had not been called Big Barb until little Barb, their only child, had come along in the early Fifties.

The early Fifties was when Big Ed had made the strike in Scogie County. Scogie wasn't any Pecos or East Texas field, but it had been almost as big as the Sprayberry discovery out around Midland and Odessa.

Since then, Big Ed had found more oil and gas in Erath County, Palo Pinto County, in Wyoming, Canada, and Florida. He had also found time to stalk big game in Kenya and Rhodesia—he still called it Rhodesia, none of that Zimbabwe nonsense—to sail the rough waters off the coast of Australia, to play killer tennis, shoot golf in the high 70's, and pilot his own Lear.

He was a man who loved his country, his state, his city, his family, his friends, and his bidness, and he wouldn't give you a dime for anybody who didn't feel the same way.

Big Ed said what he damn well thought, did what he damn well pleased.

"That's what fuck-you money is all about," he took satisfaction in saying.

The Ed Bookmans were as close to Texas royalty as you could be—Big Ed through birth and performance, Big Barb through marriage. But their daughter and I and Shake still thought they were kind of funny.

And now in Big Ed's office that morning, I could see on his face the look of a man who wanted to have Swami Muktamananda measured for a cement robe.

Big Ed, T.J., Darnell, Shake, and myself were all sitting around a conference table, warming up each other's coffee cups, as Big Ed said:

"You think I can't get it done? I'll call Vegas! I can get it done quicker than that swami can say shish-ka-bob! It won't cost me a wink of sleep, either! Foreign sons-of-bitches are bad enough when they wear their black suits and their mirrored sunglasses and try to tell me how to run the oil bidness! Now I got me a Hindu lunatic who's fucking around with college football! God damn, I wish I had my own hydrogen bomb!"

"India ain't good for shit," said T.J. "What they got over there? A bunch of fuckers in bedsheets makin' mudpies, is all."

Shake made the valid point that murder wasn't the answer to the problem. He said that Swami Muktamananda, or Haba, might be the only person through which we could reach Tonsillitis Johnson and get his mind straightened out.

Darnell said, "Swami's a tough dude. I've had three meetings with him. Mr. Bookman gimme the authority to offer him three hundred thou, but he just sit there cross- legged."

The number impressed me. So did Darnell. Darnell talked that jive shit that he thought white people expected of him, but his face told me he was no dummy. You know how some guys have a smart look? Darnell had it. I'd found out he'd not only played ball at Texas Southern, he had graduated with a business degree. Until now—until he had become Big Ed's "geologist"—he'd been a bookkeeper for Big Rufus, a fast-food chain that specialized in barbecue, headquarters in Houston.

Darnell had been determined to get out of Boakum, not to wind up like his daddy—be a handyman the rest of his life. Football had got him out. And football was going to get him somewhere else, you could tell. Football and Tonsillitis.

All I knew about the mother of Darnell and Tonsillitis was that she still cooked the chicken and dumplings—"C's and D's," Darnell said—for the Boakum High cafeteria.

"Would you really pay three thundred thousand for Tonsillitis?" I said to my father-in-law.

"For a national championship?" said Big Ed. "I'd go a lot higher. That's all it'd be. Tonsillitis and that Toothis kid can take us straight to Number One."

"Where would you max out?"

While Big Ed was making up his mind about it, Darnell said, "Swami don't care about money. Swami be talkin' about America—how Americans confuse
style
with
substance
."

"Hear that?" T.J. said, a little wild-eyed. "Try that shit on!"

Shake said it sounded like Big Ed hadn't come up with enough "substance" yet.

"Half a million," said Big Ed, arriving at a figure. "But I'd damn well want the assurance that Tonsillitis was back to normal and wasn't hangin' upside-down in his bedroom."

"Upside-down?" I looked at Darnell.

Darnell said, "Tonsillitis be hangin' upside-down thirty minutes ever day before lunch."

Tonsillitis was also into incense, meditation, exercises. He was staying in shape—that was one good thing. Darnell didn't know what you called it when Tonsillitis placed his hands on the brick magnets and hummed for an hour.

"He's chanting," Shake said.

"Rrr-i-g-h-t," said Darnell. "You know about that shit, baby."

"What the fuck difference does it make, hummin' or chantin'?" T.J. said. "All I know is, the best football player in America is sittin' down there in Boakum, Texas, with his head out of whack, and I'm sittin' up here at TCU tryin' to pull a string out of a duck's ass."

Big Ed came up with a plan. He wanted Shake and me to go to Boakum, make an effort to talk some sense into

Tonsillitis. There was a chance he would listen to a couple of famous football players. If we had no luck with Tonsillitis, we were to meet with Swami Muktamananda.

We were to offer the swami $500,000 to convince Tonsillitis that the only way to purify his soul was to play football for TCU. The swami could take the money all at once or in deferred payments; whatever his tax man suggested. This was Big Ed's final offer. The swami could take it or leave it.

Darnell said he might need twenty-four hours to set up the meeting with the swami. The swami didn't live in Boakum. He was commuting from Austin.

"It's all I know to do," Big Ed sighed. "If this don't work, we'll just have to find us another nigger. Excuse me, Darnell."

Darnell had a good feeling about the plan. Five hundred thousand dollars was "mucho Dolores." Big Ed might have bought himself a swami, he said.

Shake's article on pro football hit the newsstands that afternoon. We bought two copies of
Playboy
in the hotel gift shop and barricaded ourselves in the Hyatt Regency suite. We gave the hotel operator a list of the only people we would take calls from. We ordered two quarts of youngster, a gross of BLT's and French fries, and a vat of coffee from room service. We kicked off our shoes, pulled out our shirttails, turned on TV, and settled in for the night.