Life Its Ownself

by Dan Jenkins

  LIFE ITS OWNSELF

  The Semi-Tougher Adventures of Billy Clyde Puckett and Them

  by DAN JENKINS

  Simon and Schuster New York

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any other resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1984 by Term Themes, Inc.

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form

  Published by Simon and Schuster

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  New York, New York 10020

  SIMON AND SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Barbara Marks

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Jenkins, Dan. Life its ownself.

  I. Title.

  PS3560.E48L5 1984 813'.54 84-14086 ISBN: 0-671-46024-2

  This one was always for my ownself.

  You win football games with them horny old boys who want to eat the crotch out of a end zone.

  —T. J. LAMBERT

  Order us another drink, Billy Clyde. I'll go ask those girls what color cars they want.

  —SHAKE TILLER

  There's nothing wrong with my marriage that a faith healer can't fix.

  —BARBARA JANE BOOKMAN

  Laughter is the only thing that cuts trouble down to a size where you can talk to it.

  —BILLY CLYDE PUCKETT

  ONE

  It was never true that I loved my medial collateral ligament more than I loved Barbara Jane Bookman. That was a rumor Barbara Jane started. She started it while I was still active in the National Football League, back in the days when I, me, Billy Clyde Puckett, your basic all-pro immortal, was expected to go out there every Sunday and crack open a 220-pound can of whipass. She also spread it around that I loved Kathy Montgomery more than I loved Barbara Jane Bookman, but, hell, Kathy wasn't my wife. Barbara Jane was. God damn women, anyhow. Sometimes I think T. J. Lambert was right. He always said if women didn't have a pussy, there'd be a bounty on 'em.

  As most people know, an injury to the medial collateral cut my pro football career down to an interesting size. All of a sudden, I could sit on a cow chip and swing my legs.

  What actually put me out of the game was this thing a speed freak named Dreamer Tatum did to the ligament one Sunday afternoon. What Dreamer did was, he hit me a lick that turned my right knee into a dish of Southern-cooked turnip greens, and when you get a "knee" in pro football, you might as well have a rare strain of incurable, scab-flaking Asiatic gonorrhea. Here's how they talk about you in the front office:

  COACH: Wish we had Billy Clyde Sunday.

  OWNER: He's got that knee, you know.

  COACH: He'd give us everything he's got.

  OWNER: On one knee.

  COACH: He's the best we ever had.

  OWNER: On two knees.

  COACH: Maybe his knee's okay.

  OWNER: YOU can't fix a knee.

  COACH: What do you think of our foreign policy in the Middle East?

  OWNER: It's fine, except for Billy Clyde's knee.

  Fate rolled over on me in the opening game of the season on that Sunday a year ago. Me and the New York Giants were playing Dreamer Tatum and the Washington Redskins. I was in the best condition of my life, ready to start my tenth year with the Giants. In nine seasons as a running back in the NFL, I'd been all-pro six times. Jim Brown's records were safe, but I ranked in your top ten on the all-time rushing list with 9,863 yards. The Giants had been to nearly as many playoffs as the Dallas Cowboys. We had even won a Super Bowl my fifth year when we went out to Los Angeles and whipped the dogass New York Jets.

  Not a bad record, some said, for a rascal out of Texas who had come up to Manhattan Island with two pairs of jeans and four dirty shirts and thought veal piccata was a fucked-up chicken-fried steak.

  Sorry about the stats. I only recited them because it was my high-gloss reputation as a football hero that made my knee injury seem more important around town than world peace.

  If you'd been reading the New York Daily News last autumn, you'd have thought the Commie Chink Iranian Palestinian Nicaraguan Cubans had bombed all the quiche Loraines on Madison Avenue.

  GIANTS DON'T HAVE A LEG TO STAND ON!

  And other headlines.

  The game was on national television that day, so a lot of fans remember the play. They like to bring it up at banquets when I do Q-and-A.

  Somebody will say, "Hey, Puckett, tell us about old Dreamer Tatum!" I generally respond with something hilarious, like, "Aw, he still works for the Kremlin."

  Maybe it was a Kremlin deal. That injury was the first in a series of preposterous events that not only changed my life but the lives of my friends. It was a year we were going to look back on as the dumbest in the whole history of pro football, and I mean from the flop-eared helmets of the old Canton Bulldogs to the slow-motion instant replay.

  All in all, the year was semi-depraved.

  My knee turned out to be the least thing anybody had to lose.

  The game where I caught the lick wasn't played in Yugoslavia, it just seemed like it. The New York Giants had left Yankee Stadium and moved to New Jersey.

  We left New York because our owner, the debonair Burt Danby, got struck with the notion that we would play better football and make more money—mostly the latter—if he took us across the Hudson River and put us down in a landfill for toxic waste.

  I hadn't believed we would leave Gotham, even after the New Jersey stadium was under construction.

  It wouldn't go unused, I figured. They could always hold gangland rub-outs there. Picnics for turnpike employees.

  I had said to the team, "We can't go to New Jersey. What would they call us, the Bridge and Tunnels?"

  Nobody was hotter than me about the Giants leaving New York. All of our glory years had been in New York, including the season when Marvin (Shake) Tiller, T. J. Lambert and myself carried us through the playoffs at Yankee Stadium and on into the Super Bowl.

  Yankee Stadium was my favorite relic. It reeked with charm and atmosphere. Lacework on the tall bleachers. One end zone along the first-base line, the other out in left-center near the baseball monuments. Ghosts of the past all around you. Urban renewal up there in the sky with the punts and field goals and kickoffs.

  There was no sound like the thunder of the crowd in Yankee Stadium. The place had personality. The stadium at the Meadowlands is just the reverse, stark and slick, like walking into the world's biggest skillet.

  But Burt Danby is no different from any other owner. They're all in the grueling business of tax avoidance. They all want somebody to give them a modern facility that holds 80,000 people and a wine cellar. If it happens to look more like a Sheraton Hotel than a place for a sports event, so what?

  You can dance to this: an owner's taste and sense of history only stretch as far as his greed.

  After we moved to New Jersey, nobody in our live-wire publicity office could think of a way to use a hazardous chemical for our helmet logo. The "NY" was simply changed to "GIANTS"—a minor concession to New Jersey's potential ticket buyers. But we continued to be known as the New York Football Giants, thanks to the undying support of our hero-worshiping sportswriters and sell-out broadcasters.

  The fans started calling us other things, however.

  Comedians, for one. Pricks was popular. Fuckheads caught on.

  Back then, T. J. Lambe
rt said, "We just like a little baby what's come out of the womb, Billy Clyde. Little baby can't hurt nobody, and neither can we."

  T. J.—nobody ever called him Theodore James—was far more frustrated about the pitiful team we had become than he was about our new area code. He was a lunatic outside linebacker, once a defensive end from Tennessee, who hated the very thought of losing a football game. He'd have an orgasm on every play. From the opening whistle, he'd be as mad as a redneck truckdriver who'd heard a fag come back on his CB.

  T. J. truly played football with intensity, which is a word I never heard a coach use but never failed to hear a play-byplay announcer use. T. J. liked to stick his head in there, as they say, which is why he came out of every game with his face looking like a tampon pizza.

  T.J. was unique in another way. He was one of those linebackers who didn't need pharmaceuticals to get ready to play.

  One day a sportswriter asked him how he always managed to get "up" for the games. T.J. said, "Aw, Coach just comes by and knocks on the door."

  T. J. played only one season in the New Jersey stadium. He voluntarily retired after twelve seasons in the league. His career stats were impressive. T.J. accounted for 840 sacks, 84 fumble recoveries, 48 interceptions, 18 permanent injuries, 12 quarterback trades, and 336 limpoffs.

  T. J. retired to do what he'd often talked about: become a college coach.

  His first coaching job was at Holt-Reams College, a little school out in Kansas that was so rural, the dust bypassed it.

  The day he left New York, I went out to LaGuardia to say goodbye to T. J. and his wife, Donna. Donna Lambert was a feisty pine knot of a girl who'd never been as happy living in New York as she was in the days when she twirled a baton in Knoxville.

  "We're gonna be fine, Billy Clyde," Donna said at the airpojt, giving me a hug. "I suppose we'll be on a septic tank, but there won't be no Jews around."

  T. J. squeezed my hand and squinted at me. He said, "It's my lifelong ambition come true. Think about it, son. I'm gonna get to mold the minds and bodies of our young piss- ants."

  I thought about it. I hoped the black kids T. J. coached wouldn't mind being called niggers if they fumbled. T.J. would frequently say, "In football, they's niggers and they's blacks. Niggers is what plays for them, blacks is what plays for us." T.J. had drunk with blacks, been laid with blacks, and his roommate on the Giants had been a black guy, Puddin Patterson. Together T.J. and Puddin had wiped out more redneck honky-tonks than cheap whiskey. But when it came to football, a black better not fumble unless he wanted to be a nigger, just like a white kid better not fumble unless he wanted to be a Polack, a Hunky, a fag, or a Catholic cocksucker. Football players were machinery to T.J. Lambert. Racism was the 220 and the 440.

  As a head coach, T.J. amazed all of us who knew him. He quickly turned out two winning teams in Kansas, teams that were loaded with black athletes. Then he upgraded to Southwest Texas State, where his teams went 12-1 and 13-0 and even won the small-college national championship.

  I was semi-astonished, if you want the truth. I could just hear him saying to his black quarterback, "One more interception, Leroy, and I'm jerkin' ten pounds of watermelon outta your ass!"

  Maybe Joe Paterno wouldn't have been impressed with T.J.'s coaching methods, but I was.

  "Fear," T.J. said, explaining his secret to me. "They've took fear out of football, Billy Clyde. Face mask. Quick flags. Can't touch the quarterback, he might get constipated. All I've did is put fear back in the game. Them little fuckers don't win for me, I take away they cars, they dope, they girls, and some I even put in jail. The deputy sheriffs work with me pretty close."

  What happened next to T.J.'s career comes under the heading of ironic overload. He moved on again, this time to the head coaching job at TCU, our old school—mine, Shake Tiller's, and Barbara Jane's.

  T.J. negotiated himself a five-year contract at Texas Christian University in the bigtime Southwest Conference. The school hired him to restore gridiron greatness to a school which had known it in the days of your Sam Baugh and your Davey O'Brien and your Bob Lilly, not to mention your Puckett and your Tiller.

  T.J. went to Fort Worth full of confidence. As he said to the old grads, me included, "We gonna turn this loveboat around. Them Frogs been fartin' upwind."

  He had one big problem. It was called recruiting. T.J. soon discovered that the blue-chip athletes coming out of Texas high schools rarely chose to become Horned Frogs.They would enroll at the University of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, SMU, or Texas A&M.

  T.J. began to moan about it. He'd call me up and say, "You know what, Billy Clyde? You buy them little shitasses a Trans Am, but if they don't like the way you holler at 'em in practice, they just drive that sumbitch down to A&M and stay there!"

  The reality of coaching at a major college sunk in on T.J. his first two years at TCU. The Horned Frogs lost 18 games and won only 4. T.J. was stunned, but he didn't lose his determination. "Our clock ain't stuck on this two-and- nine shit," he promised the old grads. "We gonna out-work they ass."

  I think I can pin down the exact moment the Frogs started on their road to recovery. It was the night I got another phone call from Coach Lambert. In his half-whiskey, half-sleepy voice, he said, "Son, you and Shake Tiller got to help me get that nigger down in Boakum."

  Shake Tiller, my oldest and closest friend, didn't like to admit that he cared as much about football as T. J. and me.

  Shake's attitude about life in general could be summed up by an expression he often relied on: "It ain't hard to fuck up, it just takes time."

  The friendship between Shake Tiller and me—and Barbara Jane, for that matter—dated back to grade school in Fort Worth. Destiny was kind enough to let Shake and me be teammates in high school, then college, and on into the pros. We were as close as you could be without buying each other jewelry.

  By close, I mean we were rendered brilliant on countless occasions by the same bottles of young Scotch, we were quite often transformed into Fred Astaire and Noel Coward by the same polio weed, and from our friendly neighborhood druggist we shared the same long-standing prescriptions for preventive fatigue.

  Less important to both of us was the fact that we found ourselves in bed with some of the same women, including my wife, the former Barbara Jane Bookman.

  For the time being, I'll put aside my recollection of the bulge in Shake's jockstrap, which always brought to mind a boa constrictor. I'll only say that nobody on this planet ever caught footballs the way he did. He had a knack for making the big plays look effortless.

  Shake was a pass receiver who ran his routes like a ghost ship. He'd swoop up out of nowhere and hang in the air like a date on a calendar. Then he'd come down with the football on his fingertips, and dart for a touchdown as if the two or three defensive players surrounding him were only out there for set decoration.

  One Sunday after he made four leaping catches for touchdowns against the Green Bay Packers, I said to him, "You sumbitch, you're more commercial than water."

  He said, "It's not what you've got inside, Billy C., it's how you hand it to the people."

  Shake's cavalier approach to life's serious issues almost got me disfigured during a high school game in Fort Worth one night.

  Our school was Paschal High. It was south of town, out near TCU, in what was considered to be a "good" area because there were no Mexicans and no trailer camps, your basic tornado targets.

  The guys at our school wore clean Levi's with creases in them, golf shirts with little animals on the pockets, and we all had our hair done like Jane Fonda.

  On this particular night, we happened to be playing a team from the east side of town, from a school where the guys fancied Mohawk haircuts. They came from a neighborhood where people thought a shopping mall was a self-serve gas station with Ralph's Fill Dirt & Drainage on one side and Wanda's Ceramics and Mill-Outlet Panty Hose on the other.

  All through the game, Shake kept getting clipped, speared, arm-hooked, tripped an
d piled-on by a rather celebrated East Side assassin named Aubrey Williams. My own theory was that Aubrey disliked Shake because he wasn't just a good football player, he was "cute." Aubrey was known to us as someone who liked to puncture tires on cars and hit people with long-handled wrenches. His entire vocabulary consisted of "shit," "piss," "fuck," and "more gravy."

  Near the end of the game Shake decided to deal with Aubrey Williams' abuse. He called a time-out and ambled over to Aubrey, removing his helmet and affecting the look of a guy on a peace mission.

  But after Shake dug his toe in the ground, the thing he said was, "Uh... listen, Aubrey. If you don't get off my ass, Billy Clyde's gonna break his hand on your face, and he won't be able to fingerfuck your sister no more."

  Aubrey swung instantly, but Shake ducked out of the way, which was more or less how Referee E.L. Burden's jaw got broken. I only lost two teeth and had a bite taken out of my neck in the gangfight that followed.

  Shake escaped without a hangnail, naturally. As a matter of fact, in the middle of the brawl, I caught a glimpse of him over on the sideline. He was talking to Lisa Kemp, the only cheerleader we had who didn't make you wear a rubber.

  One spring while we were still in Paschal High, Shake performed a series of the greatest athletic feats I've ever witnessed.

  It started on the playground during P. E. Some of us on the varsity football squad were playing a game of touch, just jacking around. Our game and a softball game were kind of intruding on each other, and none of us were far from the high-jump pit.

  Shake caught a pass in the touch football game and began sidestepping people, me and others. On his way to a touchdown, he scooped up a grounder between second and third in the softball game and threw out the runner at first base, and without breaking stride, he sprinted over to the high-jump pit and cleared the bar at 6-6.

  Later that afternoon at Herb's Cafe, he set a new high-score record on the pinball machine. And that evening when we double-dated in Barbara Jane's family Cadillac, he not only screwed Barbara Jane in the front seat—they were sweethearts then—but he smooth-talked Mary Alice Ramsey into screwing me in the back seat as a personal favor to him.