Life Its Ownself (6 page)

We said you shouldn't live out your favorite songs too seriously.

We took an oath not to hurt anybody on our way up, but we said it was okay to use some lip if you started to slip.

We thought the main thing you had going for you in life was what you did.

We considered it dangerous to place our complete trust in anybody who hadn't gone to Paschal High.

We nominated pretension as the gravest sin of all.

And we were willing to argue that a chicken-fried steak and cream gravy at Herb's Cafe could duke it out with any phony Frenchman who ever wore a chef's hat.

We were armed with these notions when we moved to New York City.

Shake and I had made a pact. We would either play for the same NFL team or go to the Canadian League. We had some bargaining power, having been your sought-after All-Americas. We also had Big Ed Bookman for a "bidness" consultant.

Big Ed talked a lot about bidness. The oil bidness, most often. "The oil bidness is America's bidness," he would say.

The New York Giants went for our deal, probably because Burt Danby got tired of hearing Big Ed drop the names of Lyndon Johnson, John Connally, John Tower, and Gen. William Westmoreland, who hadn't inducted us into the army during Viet Nam because we'd had the wisdom to be born white and our hair didn't hang down below our earlobes.

The Giants selected me in the first round of the NFL draft; then they traded a future No. 1 and some cash to the Cleveland Browns to acquire Shake Tiller.

Barbara Jane moved to New York at the same time we did. Her parents didn't get to vote on it. She was still about half in love with Shake at the time, or thought she was.

We lived at the Westbury Hotel while Barbara Jane hunted for an apartment that would be suitable for the three of us. She came up with a Park Avenue co-op for us to buy. It had four terraces and three wood-burning fireplaces.

Shake and I agreed it was suitable for the three of us. Luxembourg could have slept in the living room.

Barbara Jane had majored in English and minored in journalism at TCU. She had expected to walk into one of the TV networks, pronounce Dien Bien Phu correctly, and get a job as a production assistant, but she never had the opportunity.

Fate kept on happening.

Barb was "discovered" by Burt Danby the first time Big Ed and Big Barb treated us to a night at "21," Big Ed's favorite New York restaurant. We were fresh faces in town. Barbara Jane was still buying Oriental rugs for the apartment. We hadn't even found out what bars not to go in—like "21."

But in we waltzed, and there was Burt at the bar with all the little model airplanes, trucks, cars, baseball caps, and polo mallets dangling over his head.

Burt was swirling in a clump of network biggies when his eyes suddenly feasted on Barb.

"Holy shit," he said, "who put the tits on Lassie?"

Burt sprang into action right away. His introductions set all the machinery in motion that helped turn Barb into a high-rent model.

Few people ever blitzed Big Town quicker than Barbara Jane. She kissed it on the lips and backed up the trucks.

All of a sudden, she was not just in our apartment, she was everywhere. You looked at a magazine ad, and there Barb was, telling you what to smoke or drink. You looked up on a billboard and she showed you how to get a suntan in your bikini. She slinked across your TV screen, advising you to stay in a specific chain of hotels. She saucily tossed her hair at you on TV, daring you not to drive on her steel-belted radials. And she washed her hair on TV, strongly hinting that your own hair would come out by the handfuls if you didn't use her shampoo.

None of this surprised me. One way or another, I had figured Barb would trick New York. She was too good-looking for it not to happen.

Barbara Jane was so heart-stopping pretty, she could raise the blood-pressure on a marble statue. She had flowing hair of streaked butterscotch, skin that tanned easily, and dark brown eyes that seemed to approve of everything you were thinking or saying. Her body was merely perfect—not the kind to set off burglar alarms in a tri-state area, but simply a luscious body with nothing out of proportion.

When she walked down Fifth Avenue in a pair of snug jeans and flashed her pretty smile, guys tripped over street vendors and fell into piles of stolen jewelry. In the summers when she'd walk into a restaurant wearing something white and semi-revealing over that wood-stained figure, forks dropped all over the room.

Barb could have scooted by on looks alone. Most beautiful women do. But she had all of the extras—the ones I admired, at least.

She had spirit, independence, street smart, book knowledge, wit, a quick laugh, and a lethal tongue. Unlike most models, she was alive, energetic, inquisitive.

Being intelligent, Barb never had any respect for the modeling business, even though she earned some disgraceful amounts of money at it. Not respecting the business didn't make her stupid. Like she said:

"Hey, if the agency dopes want to pay me this kind of bread to wear their corsage, I'll go to the prom, okay?"

She playfully described herself as a "prime-time hooker."

Shake liked to tease Barb about modeling. He'd try to get her to confess that she believed her talent was essential.

We were hanging around the apartment one night when he said, "Don't be ashamed, Barb. Models are great for the economy. They create activity in the marketplace. You believe in some of the products you sell, right? I think you're protecting the consumer from inferior merchandise."

Barbara Jane thought this over for a moment, then slowly broke into a smile.

"That dog won't hunt," she said.

Through all the years of Barbara Jane and Shake's on- again, off-again love affair, I was the good friend. I scoured the countryside to find a Barbara Jane of my own, but there was only one.

Barb didn't help my cause. Not once did she ever give her total approval to any girlfriend I had. Oh, sure. She would be nice to the girl if I happened to be in the middle of a romance, but she would never say something like "Gee, Mary Alice Ramsey's a great girl," or "Golly, Rachel Watson's a lot of fun."

What Barbara Jane would be was tolerant. Great word. She would be all-out, full-on, no-holds-barred tolerant.

The days and nights weren't without laughter and frivolity in the days when Barb and Shake and some girl and I would go out on the town together, or stay home together, or even take a trip together. And occasionally there would even be the unique entry—the keeper—that Barb might adopt as a friend. But eventually my relationship with the girl would be ruined—buried, forget it—because Barbara Jane's "review" would come in.

Sometimes I would ask for the review, but even if I didn't, the review would come in. One word. Maybe two. A short review but a killer.

And dead. The poor girl would be a goner. She might be a pile-driving, bone-crunching showstopper, but Barb's review would reduce her to the lame, gnarled, disease-trodden, nuisance-peddling intellectual dwarf I urgently had to get rid of.

Take high school. Mary Alice Ramsey was a prize. She was beautiful, stacked, sweet, generous, kind. But one evening at Herb's Cafe, as Shake and I and Barbara Jane were sitting around—a major-league sport in Fort Worth—I made a tactical blunder. I elaborated on the virtues of Mary Alice Ramsey.

"Daddy," Barbara Jane said, slipping a word in.

"What?"

I was looking up from a cheeseburger as I reacted to the word.

"Mary Alice talks about her daddy a lot, doesn't she?"

I thought it over. Barb had been right. Scratch Mary Alice Ramsey, that filthy bitch.

After Mary Alice, I had a good run with Mopsy New- some, a very sexy Junior Favorite whose talent for lap- dancing was far ahead of its time. The affair ended after one word from Barbara Jane.

"Overbite."

Our senior year in high school, I became an item with Rachel Watson. Rachel was a knockout, cool and sophisticated, a girl who stayed ahead of the trends in music and fashion.

"You like Rachel a lot, don't you?" Barb got around to saying.

"She's different," I said.

"She's awfully pretty," said Barb, "but..."

"But what?"

Barb held me in suspense.

"
What?
"

Barbara Jane shrugged apologetically.

"Clothes Nazi."

And so it went. On through college. On into New York.

Only a fool would have dropped some of the convivial helpmates I was involved with, but Barbara Jane's reviews knocked them off like 21-point underdogs.

Cissy Walford?

"Hamptons."

Charlene Gaines?

"Gucci."

Becky Taylor?

"Grateful Dead."

Dede Aldwyn?

"Clone."

Sally Anthony?

"Dits."

Melinda Rideout?

"Nose whore."

Tiffany Howell?

"Chunko."

Ginny Beth Martinson?

"Y'all come out to the ranch."

Eileen Brice?

"United."

Cynthia Rogers?

"Sushi bar."

I once made it through two months without a review. It was our third year in Manhattan, the football season I fell in love with Jan Fletcher.

I had first seen Jan Fletcher on television. She had burst onto the screen one night as a reporter for a local independent station.

Jan was intoxicating, a girl with long black hair and eyes as blue as a soap wrapper. I would later discover she didn't have a blemish on her entire miraculous body.

I called Jan up for a date the first week she was on the air. There was something engaging about her delivery. If she looked into the camera and said, "The fire apparently started on the fourth floor of the tenement," it came out as if she had said, "Please fuck me, somebody."

Jan was more than ravishing and sultry. She was good- natured, carefree, quick as Barbara Jane. Shake found nothing wrong with her. I certainly didn't. And neither did Barbara Jane—-not for two months, anyhow.

Then I blew it. I as much as challenged Barbara Jane on the subject one evening as we sat at the bar in McMullen's and I rambled on too long, too rapturously about Jan Fletcher's flawless face, body, intellect, and personality.

Barbara Jane interrupted me with two words.

"Pina colada."

The words came out softly, but there was a gleeful look in Barb's eye.

I clung to my drink for a moment, the words twisting deeper into my heart. I could only stare off into a void, past the other models in the room and all the guys suffering from acute hay fever. I was trying to deal with the undeniable fact that Jan Fletcher drank nothing but pina coladas, and probably because she liked the sound of it.

We didn't break up the next day. Our relationship just gradually decayed, passed into oblivion. Shake observed that I crawled away like a sick rat looking for a drain.

There were those who said Barbara Jane saved me from an enormous amount of torment. It developed that Jan Fletcher was more concerned about her career than anything else.

She hopped into enough beds to get a job as a network correspondent and moved to Washington to cover the merry pranksters in our nation's capital. There, she indulged in a public affair with a married Congressman, then with a married Senator. Her own well-publicized marriage to a New York magazine editor didn't work out. Neither did her second well-publicized marriage to a music company mogul. That marriage led her to Hollywood. The last I heard of Jan, she was feverishly screwing her way up the production ladder at a major studio, one of those Universals, and she seemed to be living happily in the condo she had built in Liz Smith's column.

Not to give myself a greater sense of honor than I deserve, but I would never have had a serious romantic thought about Barbara Jane as long as she and Shake Tiller were in semi-love.

Many's the night I yearned for her. She was the reason I searched so diligently to find a girl with all of her attributes. But it wasn't until she and Shake realized they weren't in a married kind of entanglement that I looked at Barb with my eyebrows raised.

All but close friendship was over between Shake and Barb by the time we were pushing thirty. About a week after the game in the winter of that year we won the Super Bowl, Shake made a big decision. He wanted to explore foreign lands. Alone. He explained to Barbara Jane that he was twenty-eight and three-quarters, he hadn't written Madame Bovary yet, and he needed to seek adventures that would enhance his literary talents. Also, he wanted to get laid by a variety of accents.

We were sitting in the back room at Clarke's the night he broke the news to Barb.

"This is something I have to do alone," he said. "I want to see if it's true what they say about French women."

"What, that they're a size five?" said Barb.

"I need to absorb some of the culture of the Old World."

"You do have this thing about cathedrals, don't you?"