Life Its Ownself

by Dan Jenkins

  "He's gone," Burt said. "I'll take any white guy I can get. We'll have the first draft choice. I'd like to get the kid from Illinois, but he's got Count Dracula for an agent. I may trade for the guy at Tampa Bay."

  "Ron Tooler?" I said. "He's slow."

  "Yeah, but he's white. You want to know the real trouble with pro football, Billy Clyde? Forget the zebras. Too many spookolas, that's our problem."

  "Too many what?" said Kathy.

  "Mola gomba," Burt said. "We're getting too many. Pal of mine at Y-and-R's been a season-ticket holder for twenty years. He doesn't go to the games anymore. He says, 'Fuck it, I already take National Geographic.' I argue with the networks about it. I told 'em one of these days if we aren't careful, we'll be right in the shitter. They say I'm wrong, look at ice hockey. They say ice hockey's an all-white sport but nobody watches ice hockey on TV. You can't give it away. Jesus, I know why nobody watches ice hockey. It's got nothing to do with color. They don't watch ice hockey because it's played on fucking ice! We're gonna be in trouble if we don't cut back on the mogambo, I'm serious. That'll be some great Super Bowl one of these days—Swaziland and Mozambique in the fucking Rose Bowl!"

  Before the game started, Kathy went to the broadcast booth to prepare her picnic, and I wandered down on the field to visit with Shoat Cooper and some of the Giants.

  The old coacher said, "I sure wish I had you with us today, Billy Clyde."

  "Looks like you need more than me," I said.

  Shoat said, "This season ain't exactly been my idea of high times. I'm gonna have to get me some lumber and nails and start over, is all I can do."

  Where did he intend to start?

  "Not a bad place right there," said Shoat. He looked at Dump McKinney, who was flipping passes to receivers. "That withered-arm sumbitch can't spiral it from me to you."

  "You need help in the offensive line," I said.

  "Tell me about it," the coach said. "Powell there can't spit over his chin. Brooks ain't been off his belly since October. Jackson's so slow, he has to make two trips to haul ass. Burris swapped his brain for a tree stump. I ain't been around so many jewels since the last time I was in Woolworth's."

  I spent a moment with Dump McKinney.

  I asked the quarterback what the Giants might try to do against the Cowboys today.

  "Get out of their way," Dump said.

  Larry Hoage welcomed our TV audience to a "bronco- bustin', calf-ropin', steer-wrestlin' wingding of a ro-day-o" that was coming from "deep in the heart of Dallas, Texas, where the deer and the antelope roam."

  Larry glanced at me for a comment on the game before the kickoff. I said it had been a while since I had seen an antelope in Dallas, but I'd bet Neiman-Marcus had one in stock.

  The Cowboys secured a spot in the playoffs by rolling to a 24-to-Q lead over the Giants in the first quarter. They scored on two intercepted passes for touchdowns, two field goals by their placekicker from Kuwait, and two safeties, which were the result of Dump McKinney slipping down in his own end zone while looking for a receiver.

  Larry Hoage gave full credit to Dallas' "Doomsday Defense," which hadn't existed for years.

  There was a moment during the first half when we watched a cut-in from the New York studio on our monitor. That day Charlie Teasdale was refereeing a game in San Francisco, and when he had taken the field at Candlestick Park, he had received a standing ovation.

  Larry Hoage hadn't read Shake's story, I gathered, or read anything about the expose in the newspapers, or even listened to Brent Musburger on the cut-in, because when New York came back to us, Larry said over the air:

  "What a great tribute to a great guy! We don't give the officials enough credit, by golly! Kind of thing you like to see!"

  I was standing up, my broadcast habit now—and looking down on the field in the third quarter, when I heard Kathy's voice on my headset.

  "Wow—Barbara Jane Bookman, it's you!"

  My wife was in the broadcast booth.

  I took off my headset and started over to give Barb a kiss.

  "Nice surprise," I said.

  "So is she," said Barb, retreating coldly, telling me with a look that Kathy Montgomery was never going to be her best friend.

  I knew there was something I didn't like about Learjets. If your father-in-law owned one, and it happened to be sitting around in Los Angeles on business, and his daughter happened to get on it, she could be in Dallas in two hours, and surprise you in a broadcast booth, and get the wrong impression about your stage manager. Because of the Learjet, a guy could get separated, even divorced, and be miserable the rest of his life. The Learjet had its drawbacks.

  Now in the broadcast booth, Barb turned to Kathy, and said:

  "Hi, Ken. How's it going?"

  "Ken?" Kathy frowned.

  I said, "Her name's Kathy, Barb. Kathy Montgomery. She's a good girl and a good friend."

  Barbara Jane said, "I see why you leave on Thursdays for a Sunday game. Good luck with your life, asshole!"

  With that, Barb whirled out of the booth.

  I went after her. Not in a panic, but hurriedly.

  Out in the stadium corridor, as Barb was getting on the press elevator, I said, "Come on, honey, it's not what you think—and I'm on the air, damn it!"

  "Wrong," she said. "You're on the street."

  SEVENTEEN

  Leukemia was a butterscotch pie compared to marital discord. My dad had been right all those years ago. Marital discord drove a toothpick up your ass with a sledgehammer and dragged you backwards through a sewer drain. Marital discord could turn you into a knee-crawling, dog-puking drunk, a dope-sick, no-count, sorrier-than-white-trash, store- bought son-of-a-bitch whose ass wasn't worth wiping with notebook paper. Marital discord made you so God-damn tired, you couldn't eat spaghetti.

  Marital discord didn't necessarily make you a bad broadcaster, though. I was nominated for an Emmy in December, as the playoffs got underway.

  I would have been prouder of it if almost every broadcaster in sports television hadn't been nominated, either as the Outstanding Sports Personality—Host or Outstanding Sports Personality—Analyst.

  It wasn't until after the news of the nomination had come in the mail at the New York apartment that I found out the three networks had nominated their own people. The imbecile Larry Hoage was even nominated by Richard Marks, so it wasn't as if we'd been selected by a panel of Walter Cronkites.

  I only felt like I deserved an Emmy if you compared me to Larry Hoage, but being separated from Barbara Jane, I kind of wanted to win the thing out of some feeling of vengeance.

  None of our friends could believe Barb and I were separated, and neither could I. And none of our friends could do anything about it. Everybody made a plea to Barb in my behalf—Shake, T.J., her parents, Burt Danby, Dreamer, even Kathy, which must have been the briefest conversation of them all, knowing Barb. Shake was as good a friend of Barb's as he was mine, except that when it came to domestic matters, men stuck together. He went out to the Coast, a mercy trip, to try to patch us up. Came back with a bruise.

  I had tried once. Pride wouldn't let me go any further.

  In a conflict between men and women, pride becomes the adversary of both.

  The day after Barbara Jane had turned up in the broadcast booth in Dallas, I had returned to the Westwood Marquis and we'd had one of those debates that never get you anywhere and only infect you with an anger that's hard to get rid of because it burns the lining of your soul.

  I began by saying, "Barb, this is the first real problem we've ever had. We've got a chance to show what we're made of here."

  "You've done that," she said.

  "You're wrong about me and Kathy Montgomery," I said. "I know why you think what you do. I should have told you about her from the start. I was an idiot. I can't really explain it, except that good-looking women don't like to hear about other good-looking women... do they?"

  "Good-looking?" said Barb. "She's fucking immortal! You d
o have good taste."

  "Kathy's a kid," I said. "She's a young girl out of Berkeley ... a television junkie. She's ambitious. She thinks I'm a big deal. Girls her age are always into hero-worship, I can't help it."

  "Is this going to be the tenor of our conversation?" Barb said, lighting a second cigarette to go with the one in the ashtray. "Are you going to remind me every two minutes that she's younger than I am?"

  "Nothing happened between us, that's the point," I said.

  "Bullshit."

  "It didn't."

  "Bullshit!"

  "You're wrong," I said. "Why do you think it did?"

  "Because I've seen her and I know you. Two months with Ken! How dare you?"

  "What the fuck have I done?"

  "You lied to me...took advantage of me. How many Kathys have there been? I know you, Billy C.! I've known you all your life! You've got about as much willpower with women as you do with barbecue ribs!"

  "Why'd you marry me?"

  "I loved you. I thought you had become a grownup."

  "Did I hear a past tense?"

  "Yes!"

  "You don't mean it."

  "The hell I don't!"

  "You're just hot, Barb. I admit you have a right to be. I misled you—it wasn't really a lie—for some dumb reason I can't explain, but you don't stop loving somebody because of that."

  I tried to go near her. She stopped me with a look of "territorial ferocity," as Shake described it in a book. Women were better at it than leopards.

  "You'd like Kathy if you knew her," I said.

  "Ha!"

  Somehow, I had known that was the wrong thing to say, even as the words came out of my mouth.

  "She looks up to you," I said, making it worse.

  "Good!" said Barbara Jane. "I'll send her an eight-by- ten!"

  "While we're on the subject of friends," I said, "what about the suave Jack Sullivan?"

  "What about him?"

  "What's going on there?"

  "Oh, no," said Barb. "Uh-uh, you're not going to turn this around. You're the asshole here, not me. And I want you out of here—now!"

  "Jack Sullivan's just a good friend... a director, right?"

  "That's right."

  "Well, that's all Kathy is—a good friend and a stage manager."

  "Did you hear what I said? I want you out of here."

  "What the hell will it take to convince you, damn it?"

  Barb said, "A couple of snaggled teeth and a case of acne would help."

  I smoked one of Barbara Jane's cigarettes.

  "Marriage is a full-time job, Barb. Happiness is a state of mind. I'm ready to work on it if you are."

  Barbara Jane looked around the hotel suite, mystified.

  "Who am I talking to? When did Joyce Brothers come in the fucking room?"

  "What do you expect me to do?" I said.

  "Leave."

  "Just walk out? Walk out that door?"

  "Yeah. You put one foot here, the other foot there, and pretty soon..."

  "I think I will."

  "Fine."

  "I think I won't be back."

  "Better."

  "You don't have a good enough reason to give me all this shit, Barb."

  "Oh, really? I've got five years to look back and wonder how many chicks you made it with and I don't have a good reason?"

  "None," I said. "Starting with Kathy."

  I didn't think it would serve any useful purpose in our discussion if I confessed that making it with Kathy had crossed my mind. Deep down, I felt I would never have gone the distance with Kathy that night in Dallas. I would have pulled up lame somewhere. With Kathy, it had been a question of trying to get to the bottom of a puzzle. Once the puzzle was solved, the game was over. I didn't know how many people would ever believe this, but I knew it was true. Christ, it wasn't as though I'd never scored a pretty girl before.

  "Goodbye, Twenty-three. I know how lonely it is on the road, but you'll manage," Barb said.

  "You're gonna be God-damn sorry if I walk out that door."

  "Life is full of gambles."

  I went to the door.

  "You don't want any of your clothes?" she said.

  "Fuck clothes," I said. "I got clothes and broads stashed all over the country!"

  I doubt if T.J. Lambert could have slammed the door any harder than I did. As an old inanimate object kicker, I gave it my best effort.

  Shake Tiller's pro football expose had created some havoc in the television industry, of course. Because of the cloud that hovered over the quality of the competition one might expect in the playoffs, CBS's leading announcers, Pat Summerall and John Madden, were advised by their agents and business managers to withdraw from broadcasting any of the playoff games or the Super Bowl.

  Their advisers felt that their reputations would be damaged if they lent credibility to what might well be a noncompetition. Only the players knew how seriously the playoff games were going to be contested.

  Richard Marks tried to quadruple their fees, but Summerall and Madden rejected the offer, which was how Larry Hoage and I wound up doing those games. I didn't have a broadcast reputation to worry about. It didn't matter. And Larry Hoage would have thrown a side-body block on Mother Teresa to get at a microphone.

  The pro football scandal had finally overtaken Larry, although he and his friend Hoyt didn't discuss it as often as they discussed topsoil, garden tools, and Orange County zoning quirks.

  I had become good friends with Teddy Cole, the producer, and Mike Rash, the director, partly because we had a common dislike for Larry Hoage.

  Teddy and Mike were in their late twenties. They had come out of the University of Miami. They were quicker than laser beams at their jobs. They saw life through the monitors in their control unit, never missed the right picture, knew when to go close, when to pull back. They were young pros, the type of electronic journalists who could witness a live assassination and instinctively know to alert the tape operator, bring up the audio, point cameras at everything that moved. They had given me some good tips. Things like keep your sentences short, you can't mention the score of a game too often, and always try to think of the one characteristic that will describe a ballplayer—Dreamer Tatum has the suede market cornered, Dump McKinney's got a 6.2 voice on the Richter scale, Point Spread Powell tapes his ankles up to his neck.

  Teddy and Mike both did fine imitations of Larry Hoage behind his back. At a dinner table or around a hotel bar, their routines kept all of us loose.

  Teddy might say:

  "This is Larry Hoage comin' at you today with a wingding of a bell-ringer from Hiroshima, Japan, friends! Here comes the Enola Gay now. She's up there in the sky looking like a fat old hen that's ready for roastin', but I've got an idea she's cooking up a soo-prise of her own. Yep! It's bombs away, as I like to say. The old egg's heading for the heart of the city! We'll be here to bring you all of the action, but right now, let's go back to Brent for an update on the race at Daytona!"

  And Mike might say:

  "This is Larry Hoage comin' at you from Auschwitz, Poland, friends, and have we got a barn-burner for you today! These rough-and-tumble Nazis are rarin' to go. They've got the coaching, the desire, and like they've said all season, this is the one they want! Be that as it may, Billy Clyde Puckett, I've got a hunch about these pesky Jews. I think they just might take it!"

  Christmas deal.

  It hadn't meant much to me since the Christmas morning I had awakened to discover I'd made that mysterious transition from cap pistols to sleeveless sweaters.

  Now it had even less meaning because Barbara Jane and I were estranged. It was just as well that the holiday fell between two playoff games.

  Christmas Day found me in a motel on the outskirts of Detroit. I endured a turkey dinner in the company of Kathy, Mike, Teddy, Larry, and Hoyt Nester, who kept us entertained with zany tales of his fun-filled years as a CPA.

  Teddy, Mike, Larry, and Hoyt all exchanged funny gifts that came f
rom adult bookstores. Kathy gave me an engraved cigarette lighter to go with the other three I had. I gave her a tricky sweater that a saleslady at Henri Bendel's had picked out for me.

  I tried to call Barbara Jane on Christmas Day. She was unfindable. Ying, the houseboy at Jack Sullivan's, informed me that Barb and Jack were spending the weekend in Del Mar with friends of the director. Ying wouldn't give me the Del Mar number even though I threatened to crawl through the phone and dust his chop suey ass.

  I wouldn't have minded knowing if Barb had liked the emerald ring. It wasn't a ring her mother would have been dazzled by, but I thought it was a decent present to give someone who no longer spoke to me.

  Barb had sent my present to the apartment in New York. It was a Porsche wristwatch, one of those multi-gadgeted things that nobody can tell time on but an extraterrestrial visitor.

  Coincidentally, we both quoted lines from Elroy Blunt songs in our cards to each other.

  My card to Barb had said:

  I can't taste the gravy

  When there's heartache on my plate.

  And her line to me was:

  He leased a high-price body

  For his low-rent mind.

  Okay, she topped me. There was nothing to do but fall back on my old philosophy and remember that laughter is the only thing that'll cut trouble down to a size where you can talk to it.

  The playoff games thrilled Dreamer Tatum and the Players' Association more than they thrilled the fans.

  Larry Hoage and I worked the wild card game between the Cardinals and Vikings on Dec. 19 before we went to Detroit. That game set an NFL record of twenty-two turnovers before the Vikings came away with a nine-to-six victory.

  In the game between Minnesota and the Lions on Dec. 26 in the Silverdome, the Christmas spirit carried over an extra day. The Vikings gave away six fumbles. The Lions gave up the ball five times on interceptions. Half the time, I thought I was watching volleyball or soccer.

  When I said as much over the air, Larry Hoage only caught the word "soccer."

  "There's an interesting game," he said to our audience. "From what I hear, soccer's really starting to take off in Europe."