Life Its Ownself

by Dan Jenkins

  Given the mood I was in while I floundered in the hospital bed for a week, you couldn't blame for me for the ludicrous things I thought about.

  I spent days watching elderly patients creeping past my room, and I wondered how many of them would be shuffled into a nursing home where they'd live out their days playing dominoes until they swallowed the double-6, believing it to be an Oreo cookie.

  I tried to estimate how many patients might be dying of malpractice because of my floor nurse. She continually looked flustered and said things like "This God-damn place is comin' down over my ears!"

  But mostly I thought about all of the obstacles life puts in the way of marriage.

  There in my room at Lenox Hill—me, my knee, and a mound of magazines and newspapers—I pondered the fact that I was now in my thirties and I only knew two couples who hadn't been divorced or estranged.

  One couple was Barbara Jane's parents, Big Ed and Big Barb Bookman. They had exchanged some sharp language, but they would never entertain the idea of divorce for two reasons. First, it would be socially inconvenient, and second, it would take Big Barb and her lawyers the rest of their lives to dig up West Texas and find all of Big Ed's money.

  Big Ed once said, "Show me a woman who wants a divorce, and I'll show you a beady-eyed lawyer comin' out of her closet!"

  The other couple was T. J. and Donna Lambert. They would never split up because they both liked Stouffer's chicken pot pies.

  But almost every guy I'd ever known had been married two, three, and four times, most often to an undiscovered actress or airline stewardess—er, excuse me, flight attendant.

  This didn't include Shake Tiller. He had been on record for years as saying he would rather be confined to a Syrian prison than have to discuss furniture ads with a female roommate.

  Dump McKinney came to mind with no trouble. I thought of how he might just as easily have fumbled the handoff to me the way he had fumbled all of his marriages, in which case I'd still be playing football. I wouldn't be in a hospital trying to read a story in People magazine about a meditative movie actor who recommended tofu with sage as an alternative to a heavy Thanksgiving dinner.

  Dump McKinney held one pro football record that would never be touched. He married three flight attendants and two Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. I learned of his fifth marriage and fifth divorce one evening watching television.

  It had come to the attention of 60 Minutes that the progressive city of Dallas had spawned a flurry of drive-in divorce centers in which lawyers were handling as many as 175 quickie divorces a day. I was watching the program when who should pop onto my screen but a disheartened Dump McKinney and his new ex-wife, Cheryl.

  "I can't explain it," Dump said to the camera, his head drooping sadly. "I thought we were the two happiest people in the world."

  The TV reporter turned to Cheryl. "How long were you married?"

  "Three days."

  "Three days?" said the reporter, trying not to laugh. "What can go wrong in only three days?"

  Cheryl ran a brush through her long blond hair, and said, "We just didn't have nothin' in common."

  Love was brutally outnumbered. That's how I saw it in the hospital that week. Maybe love could hold his own during depressions and wars, but if you gave people a little money and leisure time, love was in deep shit.

  I made a list as I lay in the hospital bed. There wasn't much else to do but glower at the cast on my leg or watch vampires make rock music on cable TV.

  As I observed it, love was forced to go up against the following enemies:

  • The insane cost of living.

  • The stranglehold of analysts.

  • Male-chauvinist jerks.

  • Male-chauvinist feminists.

  • Liberated wenches.

  • Bizarre sexual demands.

  • No sex at all.

  • His or her lack of political "awareness."

  • Whiskey.

  • Recreational drugs.

  • Born-again.

  • Porsche overhauls.

  • Rumors.

  • Gossip.

  • Confidant fags.

  • Overly familiar barmaids.

  • People "preoccupied with success."

  • Partners "suffocating" for undisclosed reasons.

  • Partners who have stomped on all the magic.

  • People who change.

  • People who refuse to change.

  • Architectural Digest.

  • Pornography.

  • Bumper stickers ("NUKE THE FAG WHALES FOR JESUS").

  • Office flirtations.

  • Jogging.

  • Business travel.

  • Dinner parties.

  • Sports on TV.

  • No-smoking areas.

  • Discos.

  • Cold pasta salads.

  • Betamax.

  • Bloomingdale's.

  • Perrier.

  • Ingmar Bergman.

  • She's too "assertive."

  • He's not "supportive" enough.

  • Numbing boredom.

  And...

  • "I'm a person, too, you selfish mutant!"

  There was a time when Barbara Jane would have agreed with me that none of those things could have affected us. We were too clever. And then some of them did affect us— and there we were, as human as everybody else.

  Nothing in our history had indicated we would ever become human. If anything, the opposite was true.

  Barbara Jane and Shake Tiller and I had known each other since the third grade. It was in the third grade that we had formed our own private club, a society dedicated to laughing at life its ownself.

  We began by laughing at the things other kids put in their sandwiches at Daggett Elementary. Chunky peanut butter? Then we laughed at everybody's clothes, and everybody's parents. I suppose you could say it got out of hand because everything after that seemed humorous, especially anything serious, except Barbara Jane didn't laugh much about Kathy Montgomery later on.

  Growing up, the three of us developed the same outlook on learning, achieving, surviving. We came to share the same beliefs about all the big stuff. Observing grownup behavior, I suspect, had more to do with it than anything.

  We agreed you had an obligation to take whatever you were blessed with in life and try to keep a shine on it.

  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.