Life Its Ownself

by Dan Jenkins

  Charlie Teasdale was quoted as saying, "We don't allow magazines like Playboy in our home, therefore I can't comment on the story. I can tell you that the name 'Kim Cooze' means nothing to me."

  To which Kim Cooze said, "He never heard of me, huh? Ask him how Old George is. That's the name of his whatyoucallit. The story is absolutely true."

  Tom Buckner of the 49ers, the president of the Players' Association, said, "In a free society, Shake Tiller is entitled to his views, and the First Amendment guarantees a magazine the right to publish those views. The leadership of the Players Association has no knowledge of a specific plan to destroy the game, but we can't speak for every individual member."

  Dreamer Tatum said, "There are so many intangibles in football, it's impossible to say whether Shake Tiller is right or wrong in his theories. If I were a fan, I can only say I would be intrigued."

  Commissioner Bob Cameron said, "Pro football has never been healthier. Commercials for the Super Bowl are selling for nine hundred thousand dollars a minute. I rest my case."

  Pete Rozelle, the ex-Commissioner, now a U.S. senator, released a statement through his office. It said:

  "There are forces at work in this country that would like to change our way of life. We must oppose these forces with all of our vigor."

  The reaction of all of the NFL owners was the same. In a matter of words, they said: "Consider the source."

  Burt Danby said it more colorfully.

  "Mondo whacko," said Burt. "I've known Shake Tiller a long time. The guy's a complainer. He'd turn down Ali MacGraw if he knew she had a cavity."

  When I came out of my bedroom the next morning at the Hyatt Regency, Shake was hanging up the phone in the living room of our suite. He was laughing.

  "That was Bob Cameron," he said.

  "You took the Commissioner's call?"

  "He liked it."

  "He liked your story?"

  The Commissioner had told Shake he naturally wouldn't be able to say so publicly, but everything in the article was accurate. The Commissioner said he had guessed the players were up to something. He was going to urge the owners to give in on the wage-scale and free-agent issues.

  Bob Cameron wasn't a bad guy. We had known him well, even hung out with him, when he had been an assistant under Rozelle. He had once worked in Network Sales for CBS, and in the days when we chased whup with him around New York, he was the liaison between the Commissioner and TV. It was because of his expertise in knowing how to heist the networks on television packages that he became the logical successor to Rozelle. The owners elected him

  Commissioner by a unanimous vote after Rozelle resigned to run for public office.

  Shake was still grinning with amazement from the phone call as he said, "Charlie Teasdale's through after this season. So are eight other zebras. Bob says they'll be allowed to retire for 'personal reasons.' That way, it'll save the league embarrassment. He says he's been trying to think of a way to get rid of those guys without a scandal. Now he has the ammunition. My story. If they don't go quietly, he'll put 'em in the joint."

  "You kicked ass," I said.

  Shake said, "The Commissioner said me and him ought to get drunk together some night—like the old days. He said if I'd keep it off the record, he'd tell me some real horror stories about the zebras."

  "What else did he say about the players and owners?"

  "He says his sympathy is with the players, but the owners approve his expense accounts."

  "Life its ownself," I said, somewhat relieved, somewhat bewildered. "You never know what that old boy will think up next."

  "No, you don't," said Shake. "He's got a bag of tricks, doesn't he?"

  FIFTEEN

  We took the farm roads to Boakum. It turned the journey into a three-hour drive in my rented Lincoln, but Shake and I agreed it would be fun to look at the knobby hills and pastures and live oaks and Herefords and goats of Central Texas. We weren't in as big a hurry as the heavy haulers that stormed past you on the freeways and tried to beat you to the next place to stop for a Lone Star and a hot link.

  We drove slowly and sometimes lingered for a minute or two in a lot of little towns that brought back memories of Friday-night high school football games, of car chases in which we all should have been killed, of punchouts and cussfights, of brassieres and panties that had been left in the back seats of Buicks and Dodges, of terminated pregnancies, of good greasy cheeseburgers you couldn't find anywhere anymore.

  We wondered if our old high school coach, E. A. (Honk) Wooten, was happy in retirement, now that he couldn't greet all the pretty girls as "Gizzard Lip," beat everybody's ass with his paddle, and lift his leg to make a clever noise like T.J. Lambert and blame it on "them damn cafeteria beans."

  We talked about all of the girls we had known, about the ones we'd liked to have known better, the ones who had undoubtedly gained too much weight by now, the ones who had kept their looks, and the ones who were raising hell because the dentists they'd married hadn't filled enough teeth to buy them a house in River Crest.

  Shake might have married Barbara Jane at one time, though he says not. Since then, he had not even been close to marrying anyone, although he spent more time under the covers than a chronic invalid.

  Now he guessed he might never marry—not until he was fifty, or so he was saying in the car.

  He said, "I'm pretty selfish of my time, B.C."

  "No shit."

  "I don't know how you do it. I couldn't deal with the crap that married guys have to take. If I was married to Barb and she put one minute of rage on me, I'd drive a stake through her heart."

  "Barb doesn't do rage," I said. "She does lip."

  "You know what I mean."

  What he meant was the heat his mother, Matilda, had strapped on his father, Marvin senior, when he was growing up.

  Marvin senior owned an electrical-supply store. Marvin senior and Matilda both worked there. So had Shake when he wasn't at football practice. Tiller Electric made them a nice living, but that didn't mean they were country-club rich. Shake had suspected this was one reason why his mother was mad all the time.

  Barbara Jane and I had never thought of Matilda as an angry person. We knew her as demanding, a perfectionist, but she had never been anything but charming around us.

  Shake said we didn't know the real Matilda. Nobody did but him and his dad, an easygoing guy with a fixed smile on his face. If Shake was right about Matilda, you had to wonder why Marvin senior ever smiled. In the privacy of their spotless, ranchstyle home, Matilda would turn into Magda Goebbels.

  Matilda had a penchant for telling Shake and his dad how to dress, what to eat, what to say, where to sit, what to watch on TV, how much money to spend on anything, where to keep the thermostat, how many logs to put on the fire, why they couldn't have a pet, where they should go on vacation, which movies to avoid, what vitamins to take, who their friends should be, how to balance a checkbook, why a certain posture was bad for you, when it was going to rain, and why crisp vegetables were healthy.

  If Shake and Marvin senior ever disagreed with any of this, they had the Third Reich to deal with.

  We were seniors in high school when Shake's mother died. She never recovered from an operation after an automobile accident. Shake had lived at All Saints Hospital while the doctors struggled with Matilda's internal complications. He had watched her fail slowly.

  Matilda had still enjoyed periods of consciousness in which she would tell everybody where to sit, what not to eat, and why smoking and drinking was bad for you. Knowing the hour was near, she even found the strength to dictate her own funeral arrangements. She wanted to be buried in her light blue summer dress by Geoffrey Beene. Felipe from Neiman's should do her hair. She requested mood music from a Gordon Jenkins album, no organ, please. Matilda's funeral demands weren't unreasonable if you measured them against those of Lucy Wood, a Pi Phi we had known in college. Lucy was the daughter of a wealthy rancher in the Panhandle. She was also a dia
betic who did herself in on Dr Peppers. She had left a note asking that her father see to it she was buried in an evening gown sitting up behind the wheel of her red Ferrari with a carton of Dr Peppers beside her.

  Matilda had been partly to blame for her own demise. She had insisted that Marvin senior turn the wrong way up a one-way street. Rather than argue about it, Marvin senior had taken the turn, and their car had collided head on with a drunken priest in a Chevrolet. Marvin senior had only suffered a broken arm.

  Four months after Matilda died, Marvin senior had married Holly McFaddin, a woman who kept books for him at Tiller Electric. Two years later, after all of us were in TCU, Shake's dad sold the business and made enough on the sale to retire in modest comfort.

  Marvin senior and Holly, a woman Shake had always liked, bought a home in Ponte Vedra, Florida, and they were living there today. Shake would visit them on occasion and stay until he was overgolfed by their conversation.

  Shake could now look back on his youth, at the home in which he was raised, with humor. His most vivid memory of Matilda was the time she had unleashed a weeklong reign of terror followed by another week of smoldering silence because of a careless remark his dad had made.

  One evening at the dinner table, Marvin senior had said, "My momma used to cook with lard. That's why everything tasted so good."

  On our way to Boakum, we were passing through another peaceful-looking, tree-lined town when Shake said, "Looks pretty, doesn't it? You know what's going on behind these closed doors?"

  "Rage?"

  "Fucking right. I guess I'll never understand why it's necessary."

  "It's a people deal," I explained.

  Shake confessed that for the first time in his life he had been feeling a little lonely, even when he was being held hostage by a shapely adorable, but it hadn't made him want to get married.

  The only thing it had done was make him want to start on a novel again. He might hire a thirty-year-old Swedish housekeeper who could double as a masseuse.

  "To live in?"

  "If she looks like Kathy Montgomery and doesn't speak English," he said.

  I wondered how the language barrier was going to solve the loneliness problem.

  "I don't want her for a friend," he said. "My friends will be the characters in my book."

  By appointment, we met Tonsillitis Johnson and Mutt Turnbull, his coach, at K's Restaurant in downtown Boakum.

  Downtown Boakum was a courthouse surrounded by four blocks of deserted storefronts with head-in parking for the only other vehicles we could see, which were four pickup trucks and a Datsun 280Z. Tonsillitis' car, courtesy of Big Ed.

  K's Restaurant looked like a place I had spent half my life in. It was a rural Herb's Cafe.

  Leatherette stools along a serving counter. Linoleum-top tables. Tile floor. A black-and-white TV on a shelf playing a Gunsmoke re-run. A blue-and-orange Boakum Bobcats pennant on the wall above a squad picture of last year's Class AA state champions, the Boakum Bobcats. Antique brass cash register. George Jones on the jukebox. Meatloaf special on the menu. Tired K cooking in the kitchen and tired Marvene behind the counter. And two fence-menders trying to beat the pinball machine.

  "Finesse that fucker, Dace!" said one of the fence-menders as the machine clanged and flickered.

  Tonsillitis and Mutt were seated at a table in the rear of the place. We sat down with them as Marvene brought us coffee we hadn't asked for and put another cup of tea in front of Tonsillitis.

  Tonsillitis was wearing a Levi jacket over a T-shirt and his yellow reflective glasses.

  Mutt Turnbull was exactly what I had expected to find. He was a squat little guy in his forties who was getting bald, the kind of man of whom his friends would say: "Mutt, you ain't gettin' any smarter, you're just gettin' wider."

  "I reckon you boys is the biggest names what's ever been in here," Mutt said. "You don't care if Marvene takes some Polaroids, do you?"

  Marvene came to the table with the Polaroid camera.

  "We're flattered," I said. "Will we be on K's wall?"

  "Honey, y'all are the Red Cross!" Marvene said. She snapped the pictures and brought us a slice of homemade chocolate pie.

  "Sorry about the Eula game," Shake said to Mutt.

  "Broke my heart is all it did," the Boakum coach said. "We'd have gone all the way again, but I hadn't ought to complain. Tonsillitis has give me more to brag about than anything else I'll have in this life."

  I asked Tonsillitis if he felt the same about football— was he still confused?

  "Haba say to probe for the inner truth," he said.

  "You can probe in college and still play football," Shake said.

  "College be havin' material value. Haba say material value is the road to evil."

  Mutt Turnbull said, "You ain't gonna get nowhere with him. The swami's got him up to his ass in clean air, clean water, pure food, and pure spirit."

  "Is that all you want?" I said to Tonsillitis.

  "Haba say it's the way to inner peace."

  Shake said, "Tonsillitis, would you play football again if Haba said it was all right?"

  "Haba don't like football."

  "Haba might change his mind."

  "Who gonna change Haba?"

  "Grover."

  "Grover who?"

  "Grover's the boss swami."

  "I never heard of Grover."

  "Haba has."

  Tonsillitis said he would follow Haba's teachings, even if they led to playing football again.

  That was all we needed to know.

  "Where can we find Haba?" I asked.

  Tonsillitis said Swami Muktamananda was waiting for us across the street in the square. The swami refused to patronize K's because the restaurant served carbonated sodas.

  We left Tonsillitis and Mutt in K's and walked over to the square, where we found Swami Muktamananda sitting cross-legged under a hackberry tree.

  The swami was a black man in a beard and dark glasses. He was wrapped in a bedsheet, wore a baseball cap that said "BLUE SOX" and a pair of high-top tennis shoes. There was no other swami in the square. It had to be him.

  Shake and I plopped down on the grass with him, introduced ourselves.

  "You are men of sweetness, I have a way of knowing," said Haba.

  I came right to the point.

  "Haba," I said, "we've got a gentleman in Fort Worth who's reached his E.O.R."

  "I do not understand," said the swami.

  "End of rope," I said. "The gentleman wants Tonsillitis to play football for TCU so bad, he's willing to increase his contribution to your cause."

  "I have no cause, I only have my teachings."

  "My man thinks your lectures would be greatly improved if you had five hundred thousand dollars in the bank."

  "Oh, my," said Haba.

  I said, "The man's name is Ed Bookman. He's extremely wealthy and a man of God. Although he's a Christian, he respects your beliefs. He says he's convinced you will have many more visions come to you out of the pitch blackness if a half a million is deposited in your account at the United Bank of Austin."

  Shake said, "I've lived a cloistered life myself, Haba, and I've learned something about bucolic. He don't pay the lights, gas, and water."

  "You have spoken a truth," Haba said.

  I said, "Mr. Bookman says he will make half of the contribution now and the other half when your disciple signs his letter of intent on Feb. 8. This is assuming we have a deal."

  Swami Muktamananda saw the need to meditate for a moment, to ask his divinity for guidance in the matter. He tilted his head back, put his palms together.

  Coming out of it, he said, "These funds would be tax- free?"

  We drove back to Fort Worth on the interstate. I put the Lincoln on cruise control, stuck an Elroy Blunt tape in the cassette deck.

  We were a few miles outside of Boakum before I asked Shake the question of the hour:

  "Do you think Big Ed knows Darnell is the swami?"

/>   Shake said, "I don't think Big Ed cares as long as he gets Tonsillitis wearin' that purple."

  SIXTEEN

  Kathy looked prettier than I had ever seen her. She sat across from me at dinner on Friday night of that week. I was introducing her to good Tex-Mex food at Casa Dominguez, a restaurant and sports salon near downtown Dallas where my picture hung on the wall in a gallery of other desperadoes.

  "It's interesting," Kathy said of the corn tortillas that were stuffed with orange cheese and chopped onion and covered with a delicate brown chili gravy.

  "You can't get this in New York," I said. "In New York, you get swill—cottage cheese inside pita bread with tomato sauce on top, or something worse. There's a place in Midtown that claims to serve chicken-fried steak. I asked a waiter one night if the gravy was any good. 'It's wonderful' he said. 'We make it with mushrooms and sherry.' He should have had his tongue cut out. The chef should have had his hands cut off."

  "Is this chicken-fried steak?"

  "No, it's enchiladas. Tex-Mex. Chicken-fried steak is something else. Chicken-fried steak is just...food."

  "I like steak and I like chicken," Kathy said. "I'm not sure I'd like them together."

  She misunderstood, I said. A chicken-fried steak was a cheap piece of beef that had been tenderized—had the shit beat out of it. Then it was cooked in a batter like fried chicken. "You pour cream gravy over it."

  "Gravy made with cream?"

  "If it's done right, it looks like scrapbook paste, but it tastes better. The chicken-fried steak was invented in 1911 in Lamesa, Texas, by a man named Jimmy Don Perkins. He was cooking in a cafe and got his orders mixed up. They can talk about Davy Crockett all they want to. Jimmy Don Perkins is my hero."

  "Is that what they teach in school down here?"

  "They should," I said. "I wish a guy from Fort Worth had invented the chicken-fried steak, but all we can claim are the ice cream drumstick and the washateria."

  Kathy looked at me with concern.

  "Historical facts," I said. "God bless I. C. Parker and J. F. Cantrell. In 1931,1. C. Parker was working for Pangburn's Ice Cream Company. He accidentally dropped an ice cream cone covered with peanuts into a pot of liquid chocolate. The world took it from there. The saga of the washateria goes back to 1934. All J. F. Cantrell was trying to do was survive the Depression. His cleaning business was going broke. He put in four washing machines, let people do their own, and called it a washateria. The place is near where I grew up. It's a landmark."