Life Its Ownself (3 page)

SoHo had become a desirable area of lower Manhattan for reasons that could only be answered by the friends of dissident poets or rabid sculptors. It was the newest place to go watch activist groups eat croissants.

Shake dismissed the idea of moving after Barbara Jane pointed out to him SoHo had an abundance of vegetarian restaurants with no-smoking areas.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Shake Tiller the Writer. Maybe I thought he would take to wearing a Lenin cap or something, but his lifestyle didn't change. He did begin to jot things down on napkins, and he grew a short beard, which looked surprisingly good on him.

The title of his novel was
The Grade-B Plot
. I have a confession. Like the vast majority of Americans, I didn't read much past the first paragraph either.

Originally, his first paragraph consisted of three words.

This said Riley:

That was it. New paragraph.

When Shake handed me the manuscript to glance at one night, I said, "You got a semi-colon in there real quick."

"Colon," he corrected.

"Well, colon, semi-colon, what the fuck," I said.

It was the kind of response Shake might have expected from a guy who'd once made an effort to write a book of his own, your typical professional athlete's memoir—why I'm great because I know how to talk to a tape recorder and get a sportswriter to clean up the grammar.

I had failed in my literary attempt, not because it wasn't art like
The Grade-B Plot
, but because I took the trouble to read it and thought it sounded like a joke book that had been put into a blender with
The Sporting News.

Unlike I would have done it, Shake re-wrote the first paragraph of
The Grade-B Plot
sixty times, but when the novel made its way into the bookstores, the only improvement I saw was in the length. The book began:

The moon was a half-scoop of vanilla that night and Riley had the slab of raw liver strapped to his bare chest when he entered the campus library. He knew Laura would be in there somewhere, screaming at Proust as usual, or mutilating pages of Dostoyevsky. He figured they might as well go over the edge together. Funny how much she had changed since the Okefenokee Swamp.

Like most first novels,
The Grade-B Plot
sold extremely well in northeastern Kentucky. The publisher, Wanderjahr Books, a subsidiary of Haver & Giles, ordered a first printing of 2,000 copies. Shake's agent, Silvia Mercer, said this was very good, as did his editor, Maureen Pemberton, a good friend of Silvia Mercer's.

Shake said literary pussy was overrated, after all. Maybe the better-known authors in Silvia Mercer's stable could appreciate her 187 pounds of energy, her pigtails, and her smock, but Shake had known pulling guards with straighter teeth and more reverence for the written word.

He was happy to be published, of course, but he wondered how often Thomas Hardy had stooped to "duty fucking."

The reviews of Shake's novel ranged from vicious to— his word—disorienting.

A reviewer in
The New York Times
called it a book for anyone who had "lost faith in the human race."

The reviewer, a professor of English at the University of Arkansas, went on to condemn the publisher for even sending the novel to the printer and binder. "How long," the man asked, "must serious artists go unrewarded while crude athletes, solely on the strength of their names, are allowed to achieve the permanence of hardcover and sit smugly on bookshelves?"

Shake said, "That's interesting. I can't find the fucking book anywhere."

Silvia Mercer got excited because
Time
magazine reviewed the book.

"A bad review in
Time
is very important," she said to Shake. "It's better than being ignored."

Shake would rather have been ignored.

The
Time
critic wrote:

In
The Grade-B Plot
, First Novelist Marvin (Shake) Tiller, a former professional football player, devotes 279 pages to the question of inaccessibility. Exactly how far should the writer remove himself from his characters and story? Tiller would have us believe there is no limit.

"What'd I do wrong?" Shake asked his agent.

"You didn't take any risks," Sylvia Mercer said. "You didn't stretch yourself."

"I was too busy typing."

The commercial failure of Shake's novel drove him straight into non-fiction. He started to work on
The Art of Taking Heat
, a how-to book designed to help the average person cope with life its ownself, and he took up expose journalism. He started doing pieces for
Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, New York, Texas Monthly.

This in itself wasn't so bad. Who among us doesn't like to know that certain leading men in Hollywood are only five feet tall and stuff washrags into their elastic briefs? Or learn that certain United States Congressmen have fathered dozens of illegitimate children in Latin America who will now blow you up with homemade bombs?

I think it's fair to say that Shake's journalistic exploits in no small way added to the confusion in our lives after Dreamer Tatum busted my knee.

About that play.

We were down on Washington's 6-yard line in the third quarter, behind by 14 points. A touchdown could turn the momentum around. Fourth down came up and I expected us to throw the ball, so you can imagine my surprise when our quarterback called Student Body Left.

Student Body Left was a power sweep for me, Old 23. The play had been a moneymaker for us when I had Puddin Patterson to block for me. It was the play I'd scored on in the last four seconds to beat the dogass Jets 31-28 in the only Super Bowl that was ever worth a shit.

The situation wasn't the same, though.

For one thing, Puddin Patterson was no longer around. He was busily selling rabbit pates in San Francisco. He had been replaced on the left side of our offensive line by Alvin (Point Spread) Powell. Point Spread Powell's idea of a block was to assume the fetus position about one second after the ball was snapped.

And there was this other thing. Obert (Dreamer) Tatum, The Black Death, was across the line of scrimmage, which was where he had not been in that Super Bowl when we made our game-winning drive.

Any loyal fan of the Jets would be quick to remind you that Dreamer Tatum had sprained his ankle in the fourth quarter of that Super Bowl. Dreamer had been watching from the sideline when we punched it in.

Loyal Jets fans were easy to recognize in my day. You just looked for the little old lady being mugged, and there they were.

Well, Dreamer was not only out there wearing the braid of his five years as an all-pro cornerback, he had something else going for him. I had noticed earlier in the game that Dreamer had fortified himself with a handful of amphetamines.

Dreamer and I had known and respected each other a long time. We had traded enough licks to be married. And nobody knew better than me that you didn't spend a lot of time running the football at him when his eyes had a maniacal gaze and he chewed his gum so fast, the slobber ran down his chin.

Dreamer's condition prompted a minor rebellion in our huddle when the quarterback, Floyd (Dump) McKinney, called the running play.

"Are you crazy?" I said to Dump. "
Dreamer's
over there!"

"We'll hit at their strength. Cross 'em up," he said.

"
Who
will?"

"Let's go, Billy Clyde. We'll take his ass to the parking lot."

"Have you looked at him lately?" I said. "Put the ball in the air!"

"My hand hurts."

"Your
hand
hurts?" I blurted out. "Did you bet Washington?"

"Fuck, no," Dump said. "They went to ten and a half."

Now, then. I don't happen to be a person who goes through life looking for signs of impending doom. Even so, I hadn't come in contact with a cross-eyed Mexican that morning. I hadn't seen a red-headed spade, or a gray dog shit on the sidewalk, or a lone goose fly across the marsh.

All of which was why I shut up in the huddle and took the handoff from Dump McKinney and ran the ball in my normal way—not fast, not slow, not fancy, but sort of in a threading, weaving, determined fashion.

The blow came while I was in the air.

I was jumping over Point Spread Powell when Dreamer's shoulder flew into my knee. It wasn't the lick itself that did me in. I landed awkwardly and 2,000 pounds of Redskin stink came down on top of me.

I didn't hear the tear of the medial collateral ligament and everything else that got cross-threaded. Maybe it did sound like somebody opening an envelope, as a newspaper guy wrote. All I knew was, the inside of my knee was on fire. You couldn't have moved my leg with a tractor-pull.

Everybody was untangling when I said, "You can turn me over, Dreamer. I'm done on this side."

"Aw, shit, Clyde, are you hurt bad?" He scrambled to his feet.

"Yeah," I groaned. "I think your pharmacist finally got me."

Dreamer made frantic gestures toward our bench. He was genuinely concerned. He helped the trainers lift me onto a stretcher and he walked all the way to our sideline with me.

The last thing I saw in the stadium was a fat woman wearing an Indian headdress and a buckskin pant suit. She screamed at me like a psychopath as the trainers carried the stretcher into a tunnel.

"We got you, Puckett!" she yelled, waving a tomahawk in the air. She glared down at me over a railing. "We got you good! Does it
hurt
? Oh, I hope it hurts you good! I hope you limp the rest of your life, you slimy bastard!"

Given a choice, I suppose I'd rather have heard the woman sing a chorus of "Hail to the Redskins."

We moved through the tunnel beneath the stands, and one of the trainers looked down at me.

"How'd you like to be married to
that
, Billy Clyde?"

"You'd have one problem," I said. "With all those dirty dishes in the sink, there wouldn't be nowhere to piss."

In the dresing room, the team physician, Dr. Fritz Ma- honey, pushed around on my knee.

"Won't know til I see the X-rays, old chum, but I'm afraid you've been Dick Butkused," he said with a hum .

It would have been more accurate if Dr. Fritz Mahoney had said I'd been Gale Sayersed. Sayers had been a running back, Butkus a linebacker. But I got the drift.

Damage to the medial collateral, a vital ligament in the middle of the knee, had prematurely ended the careers of Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers, two of your legendary Chicago Bears. Overnight, they had become famous medial collateralists.

I knew enough about the injury to realize that if I ever did go on a football field again, I'd have to wear a knee brace the size of a Toyota Cressida and play with considerable pain, but even though I understood all this, the competitor in me came out. To the doctor, I said, "This ain't the end of my ass!"

Dr. Fritz Mahoney said, "Spunk helps, Billy Clyde. Never underestimte the value of spunk. We in the medical profession place a great deal of trust in spunk."

"I'll play again—you want to bet on it?"

"Spunk can do wonders," the doctor said. "But I'll be honest. Spunk can't help you this season."

"Next year!" I said. "Football's not through with me till I say it is!"

Dr. Fritz Mahoney clasped my upper arm and looked at me proudly.

"I like your style, Billy Clyde."

"Good," I said. "Me and spunk want a corner room at Lenox Hill with a cable-ready color TV."

The most esteemed guests to visit the hospital that evening were Burt Danby; his wife, Veronica; and Shoat Cooper, the old coacher.

"Kiss on the lips, big guy!" Burt said, as he exploded into the room, doing a little dance step. "Hey, I know you're down, right? But are we talking down-down? No way! We're not talking Mondo Endo here. We're talking Johns Hopkins, baby. We're talking Houston Medical. We're talking Zurich!"

I raised myself in the bed slightly. Veronica took a seat, browsed through a magazine. Shoat Cooper dabbed at a tear, his eyes fixed on my right leg. His whole offense lay in my bed.

"Them niggers is gonna pay for this," Shoat said.

Burt Danby kept moving around. "Get this," he said. "Know what I told the media about Twenty-three? I said, Whoa, assholes, my man'll be back next season with a Gucci knee, and it's look out, Super Bowl! Whammo-spermo! Right up the old anal! Listen, you got everything you need here? How's the food? Right in the shitter, huh? Let me order you some Chinese. How 'bout some minced pork with lettuce? Fuck it, I'll call Pearl, she'll bring it over herself!"

Burt Danby was a wiry little man who had never stopped talking like an advertising executive. His old agency, DDDF, had purchased the Giants from the Mara family in the early Seventies. Burt had been named the club's chief operating officer. He had presided over our Super Bowl victory. He had suffered so much throughout the turbulent contest that he had sworn to God he would give up drinking and cheating on his wife if only we could win that one game. I later heard that after I scored the winning touchdown, Burt had jumped to his feet, shook his fist at God, and hoarsely screamed, "Fuck you, Skipper, if you can't make it in Big Town, go to Des Moines!"