My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire (2 page)

“Danny-boy?” the phone said.

“What the hell and who the hell?” It was ten in the morning and I was badly hungover from the previous night. Actually, I may have still been drunk.

“Danny? This is Sonny Lawrence.” Sonny was my agent. I hadn’t recognized his voice, which says a lot for my state of mind.

“Sonny! What’s up? Was I picked up?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll make it short. I called to tell you I’m resigning. You’ve got no contract, the way you’re going you’re not going to get one and, right now, you don’t have the cash flow to afford me.” With that, he hung up.

Two of the things he said hurt. The first was about the way I was acting. I could see how it might have looked that I was quitting on my career, but I felt that I just needed time to adjust to what had happened. What hurt a good deal more was his comment about my cash flow. I certainly enjoyed living the good life, but I’d always been careful to put money away. Or so I thought. Sonny’s call was enough to send me scurrying downtown to see Nat Firestein, my lawyer. Nat was a large barrel of a man I had met back when I was playing in Philly. We’d been friends for years and he had always handled the legal stuff, checking contracts, my will, that sort of thing. Sonny set up the deals and handled the money. It turned out that Sonny had dropped off all my papers first thing in the morning. My conversation that afternoon with Nat was pretty grim. No matter how we added it up, the debts were larger than the assets. Much larger.

“God almighty, Nat!” I said when my financial postmortem had ended. “How could this happen?”

Nat sat there for a moment, then let out a deep sigh. Sigh, hell. As an exhalation it rated just short of gale force. I could tell he had been snacking on pepperoni again.

“I should be asking you that, seeing as you’re the one who did it,” he growled. “But, I’ll point out some of the low lights. First, there was Sonny Lawrence. I told you years ago the man had shit for brains when it came to managing money. But Sonny kept you entertained, so did you listen to me? Oh no. Net result, you spent a whole lot more of your money than you should have, and what you did invest you invested in junk. People’s exhibit A.” He pulled open a drawer and tossed a sheaf of papers onto the desk. “These oil and gas partnerships you bought into, for instance, are mostly worthless. That’s not something that would have been immediately obvious, but if you’d had someone who knew what he was doing look these over, you would have known. That’s just one example. Then, you should have figured you’d be vulnerable to being released, but you weren’t interested in talking to me. Instead of being careful, you went on a spending binge as soon as the season ended. I did try to tell you about this, you may remember. I remember going over to your place with every intention of making you listen to me. As I recall, from the condition you and your companion, or companions, were in, you weren’t having dinner.”

“Hey, Nat, c’mon. Man does not live by bread alone.”

Nat didn’t see the humor in my comment. “You fucked up real good, Danny-boy. Between being careless and blowing money on women, you’ve put yourself into a nice hole. Speaking of women, we ought to talk about Susan Ridenour. You may remember her; you did date her for about four months.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic, Nat. I remember Susan.”

“Good. Then maybe you recall that parting gesture when you broke up, that promise to take care of her condo?”

To tell the truth, it had slipped my mind.

“Thought so. I found the bank coupons in the box of stuff Sonny dropped off. There are more garbage bills in there, too. I wonder if Sonny ever even tried to balance your income against your expenditures. It was all fine as long as the money was coming in and you could get credit, but now? You don’t have a chance in hell of covering these expenses.”

Mercifully, Nat ran down after a while, a side effect of age and tobacco use.

“All right, Nat,” I began when he took a prolonged pause, “you’re right and I did screw up. That’s water under the bridge though. I’ve dug myself a hole, but I’ll get out of it. I’ll get a contract.”

“Dug yourself a hole. How apt. Danny-boy, you don’t have a chance at another contract and you don’t even realize just how much trouble you got.”

“I don’t?”

“No. Does the name Sheila Doroty ring a bell?”

It did. Sheila was a U.T. coed majoring in having fun. She had the kind of body that, well, let’s just say she had that kind of body. (I’ll point out that I’ve never been mistaken for a Boy Scout and I’m not about to pretend otherwise. You’re entitled to your own opinion.) Sheila and I had had a lot of fun for a while.

Nat waited for me to nod, then continued. “I was at a rather stuffy dinner party last night. All the Dorotys were there, along with maybe two hundred other socialites. Sheila managed to get drunk, which pissed Daddy off no end. He told her that she had to learn to behave properly at functions. Big mistake. Sheila told him that she preferred to have a good time. Sam asked her what she meant by that, whereupon she gave the assemblage a very graphic description of what a good time she had with ol’ Danny-boy Troy. I thought Sam was going to have a stroke. Unfortunately for you, he didn’t.”

I thought that tidbit over. It certainly sounded embarrassing, but compared to being broke, it didn’t seem to rate.

“You look thoughtful,” Nat said. “Do you understand what it means?”

I looked up at him, and then I saw it. There must have been a lot of influential people in that room. “No more endorsements.”

“Endorsements! Idiot! You’re up to your neck in shit!”

Trading insults with Nat was an old pastime of mine, but he sounded serious. “Oh c’mon, Nat,” I said, “how does this get to be a bigger disaster than bankruptcy? I mean, for Chrissakes, Sheila’s no kid, she’s not pregnant and we both know she gets around. So why is it my problem?”

“It is
your
problem because it was
your
bedroom adventures that lit up half of Texas society and, therefore, it is
your
ass that Sam is going to go after. And that is precisely what he will get when the police bust you for possession of drugs.”

“What? I don’t do drugs, you know that.”

“Yes, I know that,” Nat said, “but what you seem to have forgotten is that Sheila’s daddy, Sam Doroty, is Judge Sam Doroty. That’s the same Judge Sam Doroty whose brother-in-law has represented your own beloved commissioner. The same Judge Sam Doroty whose cousin has been district attorney here for the past three years. The same Judge Sam Doroty who has relatives at every level of the police department. Good God, Danny, I know the saying that a stiff prick has no conscience, but yours doesn’t even have a guidance system. How could you be so stupid?”

“Natural talent?”

“Don’t joke, Danny. This is not the time. Trust me when I say that they’re going to find drugs in your apartment. Maybe you can wiggle out and not do time, anything is possible, but even if you do, what are the odds of anyone picking up your contract, between that charge and Sam’s connections?”

“You sound like you know what’s coming down,” I said. “Or is this just a guess?”

“No guess, Danny.” He sounded a bit sad. “I have enough connections who owe me favors. You just got here before I could call.”

Suddenly, I realized why Sonny had picked that particular morning to jump ship. Bad news travels fast. Nat had my full attention at that point. To be truthful, I was scared shitless. I had seen plenty of television dramas about some poor guy being framed by an imitation Torquemada and had never given it any more thought than I did anything else they showed on television. But this was a real-life judge and he was going to do it to the real-life me. In Texas, you go away for a long time for possession of drugs. I began to shake.

“Nat,” I pleaded, “don’t stop there. There has to be some way out of this! Tell me what to do.”

“Tell you what to do. I’ve been trying for years and you wait until now to decide you want to listen. What I ought to tell you is to find another lawyer.” He stopped and sighed. Maybe the expression on my face tugged at his heart. “I should, but I won’t, although I think my head must be going as soft as my heart. Tell you what to do.”

I sat there, respectfully quiet, while Nat ruminated. He was, I have no doubt, the best lawyer in Texas. If there was any way of extricating me from this mess, he would find it.

“All right,” he said at last. “I can think of a few ideas. But first, I want your word on something.”

“Name it,” I said. I’m told that agreements made under duress are not binding, and this was duress.

“You lay off the booze and the broads,” he intoned. “I’m not going to spend valuable favors saving your ass if you’re going to jump right back into the shit.”

“I promise. Now what?”

Nat eyed me carefully, as though he somehow doubted the depth of my commitment. “Do you have enough cash and plastic on you now to survive for three weeks?”

I nodded.

“Good. Danny, you leave this office and get out of town. In fact, get out of the state. Don’t go back to your place, there’s no point tempting fate. Just leave here and disappear for three weeks. I’ll have the politics settled by then. I’ll want you back here three weeks from today, call first just in case it doesn’t go right, and we’ll run you through a bankruptcy and that will take care of the financials. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” I said, “no sweat.” As it turned out, I disappeared very thoroughly. I hope Nat wasn’t too put out when I didn’t reappear.

I left Nat’s office that day in a real funk. In fact, in trying to set down the events here, I can’t remember anything between walking out of there and seeing “Welcome to Oklahoma” on the highway. I was going to be broke, and I was going to have no chance at one of those cushy jobs that pays a nice salary for doing very little. Thank you so much, Sheila. In one respect, I did plan to keep my promise to Nat. No woman was worth this kind of aggravation.

By now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “It serves that sorry son of a bitch right. Am I supposed to feel sorry for him?” The point is well taken. The only person responsible for my life being a mess was me, although I was unable to see that just then. All I could do was swear that if I ever had another chance, I was going to make the most out of it. (As you’ll see, ultimately I did, and the galaxy will never be quite the same again.)

Any second chance seemed awfully remote, however, as I headed north. All I could think of was what I had lost: my sunny and snug condominium, the ranch in Montana tucked up under the Absaroka, the heads turning whenever I entered a restaurant or a nightclub. Some celebrities hate the attention and the loss of privacy. I had reveled in it and now it was gone. I doubt that anyone who has not been a celebrity can appreciate the depth of my agony.

I might have sworn off women, but I had no intention of swearing off alcohol. I was ruined anyway, whether or not Nat made good on his promise. At best, I would stand there while everything was taken away from me. Worse, the farther I got from Nat’s office, the more my confidence in even that outcome slipped. Sam Doroty would not be placated, my mind whispered, or Nat would strike a compromise that would seem reasonable to him but not to me.

“I got you a good deal,” he would say. “You take a one to three and it’s all settled. That’s not so bad, you should be out in less than a year.”

Sure. And do what? Make commercials on the need to know your bedmate’s father?

The mental process turned into a downward spiral. Whenever I thought about the situation, my mind would find the worst-case scenario and establish it as inevitable. Then I would pick up from there and again find the worst possible progression of events. The best solution, for me, would have been to just run away from it all, but that didn’t seem possible. The next best solution was not to think. If I could not run away physically, I could run away mentally. I was fine as long as I was driving, totally involved with the road and shut off from everything else. Unfortunately, even I can’t drive twenty-four hours a day. If I tried to sleep, all those thoughts came crowding back. Alcohol, however, when taken in sufficient quantity, will blot out most thoughts. Consequently, I would drive as far as I could, then drink as much as I could. The next morning, I would wake up, hungover, and start the process again. I continued north for the simple reason that I had turned in that direction when I had first reached the highway. The amount of territory I covered each day shrank, however, as I was fit to drive for a shorter period each day. I finally ended my flight in Cleveland, Ohio.