Semi-Tough

by Dan Jenkins

  But just as we had it smoothed over, T.J. Lambert farted two or three times real loud, and hollered:

  "They's a number of things in the world that's overrated and one of 'em is how tough a goddamn cop is."

  Then he said, "I believe I'll make me a sandwich out of these sixty-dollar-a-week motherfuckers."

  And he did. He sure did.

  The Giants and the Cowboys got together and kept our arrest quiet. We got to play in the game. I think the Giants had to give up a high draft choice to the Cowboys when it was over.

  But the best testimony I can give as to how mean and tough old T.J. is has to do with a hunting trip some of us went on last year. Several of us went out on Big Ed Bookman's farm near Fort Worth one day to shoot birds. We killed birds all day and then we built a fire and started drinking.

  Everybody got fairly drunk and started throwing everybody else's hat up in the air and shooting at it. A hat would go sailing up in the air and it would sound like Saigon on election eve. This went on for a few minutes until it was Hose Manning, I think, that threw T.J. Lambert's Stetson up in the air.

  And there wasn't a single shot fired.

  That's how tough that sumbitch really is.

  Well, with all this in mind, you can understand why it got a little awkward at the CBS cocktail party in the Señor Sombrero Cafe when T.J. Lambert picked up the movie star, Camille Virl, and held her upside down by her ankles over the swimming pool off the terrace rail.

  T.J. just stood there snickering while Camille Virl screamed and cried, and while a whole crowd of people begged T.J. to bring her back up and not harm her.

  It was Barbara Jane Bookman, I'd say, who rescued Camille Virl. T.J.'s wife, Donna Lou, might have been able to do something if she had been there, but I think Donna Lou, who is a pretty good Stovette, had slipped off with Burt Danby for a spell.

  Barbara Jane went over to T.J. and said, " T.J., I always did think a woman looked better from this view, don't you?"

  T.J. said, "There's her old wool right there. See it?"

  Barbara Jane said, "What are you going to do with her?"

  "I don't know," said T.J.

  Barbara Jane said, "Why don't you drop her in the pool?"

  T.J. swayed a little and said, "Won't she get her wool wet?"

  Barbara Jane said, "Why don't you lift her back up here with us?"

  "Naw," said T.J. "She'll scratch and bite me."

  Barbara Jane said, "What did she do to make you mad, T.J.?"

  T.J. belched and said, "Aw, I don't know. I was talkin' to her and she was comin' on kind of strong like a damned old prick teaser so I said why didn't we go somewhere and I'd shit on her chest."

  "I see," said Barbara Jane, nodding.

  "She told me I was about half-foul and ought to be in a prison, so I picked her up and dangled her, which is where she is now."

  "Yeah," said Barbara Jane. "I don't blame you. But now you've scared her, so I think you ought to drop her in the pool or bring her back up."

  T.J. said, "I think I'm gonna puke."

  Barbara Jane got Camille Virl's attention and asked if she could swim and she said yes, goddamn it.

  "Drop her," said Barb.

  "I'm gone puke," said T.J., frowning.

  "Let her go," said Barb.

  T.J. dropped Camille Virl into the swimming pool, about twelve feet down.

  A lot of cocktail party drunks applauded and some others gasped. Camille Virl could swim, and pretty good, which was a stroke of luck. Because she had no sooner hit the water than T.J. Lambert's vomit did and she barely managed to get out of the way.

  Cissy Walford said, "That was such a pretty dress."

  Boke Kellum ran down to the pool with some towels.

  Shake and me and Barbara Jane died laughing. And we convinced Big Ed and Big Barb that it was really sort of funny, after all. Camille Virl was nothing but a phony movie star who was only trying to get publicity, and she deserved what happened. In fact, she would profit from it, we argued.

  T.J. Lambert said he felt a lot better, now that he had puked, and he said he was just sorry he never had puked before in his life, since it sort of revived a man and allowed him to start drinking again.

  "Let's go somewhere and get a good piece of beef," said Big Ed. "I'm buyin'."

  "I'd like a sixteen-ounce T-bone, medium rare," said Barbara Jane.

  I just took time out here in my lemon-lime bubble bath to smoke a cigarette and think. That doesn't hurt football studs, by the way. To smoke, I mean. Not to think. Most of us smoke a little, and you run it off.

  I was just thinking about Barbara Jane and all of us.

  And I was thinking about a conversation that Shake and me had one evening at our New York apartment during the regular season.

  We were just laying around drinking coffee and reading papers and listening to an Elroy Blunt album. It was one of his new albums, the one called Flip Top Heart, which features that song. We were just laying there, anyhow, trying to decide whether to wander over to P. J. Clarke's and eat some bacon cheeseburgers and argue with the owner, Danny Lavezzo, about the Giants and other intellectual things.

  Barbara Jane wasn't in town at her own apartment over on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street, which is where it's at. She was down in Palm Beach making a commercial for DDD and F.

  We had just talked to her, in fact, on the phone. And she had said that Palm Beach was the same old place — a lot of semi-rich Stoves running around with busted-out fags, and old ladies whose husbands had died, leaving them thoroughbred farms.

  Shake and me had always had conversations every so often about what the world amounted to. We didn't generally get too serious.

  Shake always questioned things more than I did, maybe because he read so many books. I always just believed a man ought to do the best he could, whether it involved playing ball or something else. I thought a man ought to laugh a lot. And then I thought a man turned up one day and just wasn't breathing any more. And that was that.

  We were talking about Barbara Jane that night in our apartment and I said, "Old buddy, do you realize that Barb has never mentioned getting married?"

  "I guess she hasn't," Shake said.

  "What do you think about that?" I said.

  "Good," he said.

  "Is it?" I said. "I don't know."

  "It's good," he said.

  I was stretched out on a sofa with the coffee cup balanced on my chest, looking up at our trophy shelf with the game balls on it and at some pictures.

  I laid there for a minute and said, "Yeah, but I wonder where we're all going?"

  "Clarke's, I hope," Shake said, who was in a chair behind an issue of Sports Illustrated.

  I smiled and said, "In what you call your life, I mean."

  "Oh, that." Shake laughed.

  And he didn't add anything to it.

  After a while I said, "It's hard for me to think of myself ever not playin' ball."

  "Not me," Shake said.

  "Really?" I said.

  "Yeah," he said.

  "Since when?" I asked.

  "I don't know. Lately, maybe," he said.

  I said, "What's that mean?"

  "Nothin' actually," he said.

  I raised up and leaned over and turned down Elroy Blunt, even though he was singing "Tell Me, Mister Tooth Brush."

  "You like it better than me, old buddy," I said. "And you got a chance to play a lot longer."

  Shake said, "You realize how long you and me have been at it?"

  "Fifteen years, I guess, starting with the Pee Wees," I said.

  "Hasn't it ever privately bothered you that we're gettin' close to thirty and we aren't anything but football players?" he said.

  It hadn't.

  And I said it hadn't.

  "Well, you just asked me about what you call your life," he said. "That means you must have thought about it."

  I said, "Well, all I meant was, I wondered if we were ever gonna be married, like you a
nd Barbara Jane, and me and somebody, and whether we would ever be living someplace like Greenwich and mowing the lawn or anything."

  "Speaking for myself," Shake said, "I can tell you that I'm not ever gonna be in Greenwich."

  I laughed.

  "I sure hope I'm not, either," I said.

  He said, "I might be in Marrakech, however, or on a ranch in Buenos Aires, or hiking in the rain forest on Kauai."

  "You can't get the scores in any of those places," I said. "You're gonna have to be here in the fall."

  Shake grinned and said, "Well, I'll always know that TCU didn't beat anybody but Baylor and that Big Ed fired the coach."

  Shake got up and went to the kitchen to get some more coffee.

  He said, "When you think about it, we've done about all there is to do, except win a Super Bowl."

  We never won State for dear old Paschal High, I pointed out.

  Shake, coming back to his chair, said, "Yeah, but they fucked us out of that. Hell, you scored twice from the one and they didn't give it to us."

  I said, "It was raining pretty hard."

  "Yeah, but remember how hot we were when we saw the films later?" said Shake.

  I said, "Have you ever felt as bad in your life as we did that night after the game?"

  "Just killed is all," Shake said.

  "I must have kicked in every door in that locker room," I said. "Hell, I knew I scored."

  Shake laughed to himself and said, "Did you ever see your Uncle Kenneth any drunker?"

  I laughed,too.

  "I don't know what he lost, but I'm sure it was everything in the envelope," I said. "He still carries an envelope, you know. He's still got the old bank and office right there in his coat pocket."

  Shake looked off for a minute. Then he said, "Spring Branch. Rotten fucking Spring Branch. And we had those sumbitches down by fourteen at one time."

  "Only time I ever saw Barb cry," I said.

  "Hell, we all cried," Shake said. "You can take your wars and your starvation and your fires and your floods, but there's no heartbreak in life like losing the big game in high school."

  I sat up and folded my hands behind my head.

  "Well, it makes you a man," I said.

  Shake said, "That's right, boy. Give 'em a few heart-breakers along the way. Straighten 'em up."

  "Take away their parents," I grinned.

  "You bet," Shake said. "Make a lot of 'em poor."

  "Turn some of 'em black," I said.

  "Mix in some cripples," he said.

  "Mostly the black ones," I said.

  "That's what the world needs more of," said Shake. "Poor black cripples."

  "Who can't get hard-ons," I said.

  "Kill some of their mothers, too," my old buddy added.

  "Oh, Christ," I said.

  And we kind of shook back and forth in laughter, and then sighed, and then didn't say anything for a while.

  Shake lit up a cigarette and slouched down in his chair and sipped on his coffee and said, "Billy C., you know what I been thinkin' I might do? If we were to win the Super Bowl this year or next, which I think we got a chance to do?"

  "Run for office?" I said, being funny.

  "Nope," he said. "I think I might hang old eighty-eight up and let 'em take it on to Canton, Ohio."

  "Yeah, me too," I said. "Next case."

  "I'm serious," he said, and he was.

  "You're serious, aren't you?" I said.

  "I believe I am," he said.

  "Well, that don't make me feel so great," I said.

  "I don't know, really," he said.

  "You got a lot of records you can break," I said.

  "Records don't mean shit," Shake said.

  I lit up a cigarette my own self.

  "What the hell would you do if you didn't play any more ball when you're still able?" I wondered.

  "Not play ball," he said.

  "And then what?" I said.

  "Not bust my ass and run my ass off and stay sore all the time from takin' licks," he said. "And not talk to a whole pack of dumb shits all the time. And not have to go to camp. And not look at a bunch of film. And not go to luncheons and dinners. And just not think about it any more."

  I shook my head.

  "That doesn't make any sense to me," I said.

  "Well, that's right," Shake said. "You see, you're gonna play until you drop because you really love it, and then you're gonna be the coach of the Giants some day, and you're gonna be goddamn good at it. But that's not what I want to do, and I'm almost thirty."

  I guess I knew that Shake never wanted to be a coach.

  And I guess I thought that what he'd do when he quit playing ball would be to take care of our investments and make us even richer, and maybe become a vice-president of the club, or something, and marry Barbara Jane, and we would all just keep on hanging around New York.

  I guess that's what I had always thought.

  I remember that I sat there for a while and tried to imagine what it would be like to play on a team without Marvin (Shake) Tiller on it. Because I never had.

  It didn't sound like fun.

  "What about Barb?" I said. "What does she say about it?"

  "I don't know," he said. "But it doesn't really matter."

  Shake said, "Barb is Barb and she doesn't care what we do as long as it's what we truly want to do."

  I said, "O.K., so you hang up old eighty-eight and then you go to Marrakech, or some fuckin' place. Is that all right with Barb, to leave New York?"

  Shake said, "Well, old Barb wouldn't be going where I go, wherever that is."

  I must say that this struck old Billy Clyde by surprise and also made him feel sick for a second.

  "I just don't believe that," I said. "Or any of the rest of it."

  Shake then said that this was the way his head was shaping up at the time being, and that it certainly was true how he felt.

  He said that he and Barbara Jane always had agreed that they would probably never get married legally because that would fuck up their friendship as well as their love.

  He said that, anyhow, he and Barbara Jane had probably been married, in spirit at least, ever since the fourth grade, and that sure was a long time.

  He said that this didn't mean he didn't love Barbara Jane more than almost anything he had ever known but he was just frankly tired of the responsibility of loving anything or doing anything, if I could understand that.

  I remember I said, "Owl shit." Or something.

  Shake went on and said that, of course, it was perfectly all right for Barbara Jane to accompany him to Istanbul or Marrakech or Tahiti as long as he didn't have any responsibility. As long, he said, as she didn't mind letting him sit in semi-open bars with bamboo curtains and ceiling fans and without a shave and looking for a young Rita Hayworth from the old movies to walk in.

  He said that being a pro football stud was probably keeping him from ever doing some of the things which had always intrigued him. Like sitting at a sidewalk cafe in San Sebastian or being a spy in Geneva or a fur trader in the Yukon or getting drunk and painting a picture on a small island near Java and waiting for a tidal wave.

  He said he might want to own and run a bar in Puerto Vallarta or Trinidad or Positano. Or he might want to own and run a fishing boat somewhere around Japan. Or he said he might just want to go sit around a lighthouse in the South China Sea and listen to waves crash against the rocks and think up poetry.

  I told him that all of that was very interesting, but that he could go do all of it in the off-season, with Barbara Jane as well. And maybe I would go, too.

  "Not the same," Shake said. "I want to disappear for a while, from everything I've ever known. I think that would be fascinating."

  "If I couldn't get the scores," I said, "it wouldn't do anything but make me hot."

  "In your case, that's right," he said.

  I said, "Listen, old buddy. There never has been a more fired-up ball player than you, or a better leader
. Don't that tell you something? Don't you know what you really love?"

  "What are you gonna tell me I love?" he said.

  I said, "You love — aside from Barb, I mean — you love catchin' balls and stickin' your hat in somebody's gizzle."

  Shake said, "Yeah, well, what I'm trying to say, Billy C., is that I'm burnt out. I've been gettin' up for games for fifteen years and playin' my ass off, and I'm gettin' close to that time, I can feel it, when I'm gonna flame out."

  Then he said, "I would like to win a Super Bowl though."

  "There you are," I said. "Let's go to Clarke's and get on the outside of some bacon cheeseburgers."

  Shake said, "You know, the thing that would ruin Barb would be for her to be married legal."

  I asked how come.

  "Well," he said, "it's because, basically, deep down, and she can't help it, she's a fuckin' woman."

  I said I thought that was a pretty lucky break, as a matter of fact.

  "Think about this," he said. "None of us have ever had an argument or a fight or hurt the others' feelings, ever, have we?"

  I said that's right.

  "So, all right, let's say me and Barb got married and lived somewhere and she was happy," he said. "Happy with the place, whether it was Tangier or wherever. And I was happy there, running my bar with the ceiling fans and the bamboo curtains and all the spies coming in and out. Do you know what would happen one day, just as sure as hell?"

  I didn't have any notion.

  "I would forget something," he said.

  He said, "I would forget one day to pick up bread for dinner or maybe I would forget to hang up my clothes. Or I might even forget to fuck her. Well, Barb, now being a legal wife, which would make her an owner of sorts, would say something about it."

  Possibly, I agreed.

  "She might say something smart-ass, or she might just utter a small complaint. But sooner or later, she would say something. Do you know what would happen then?"

  I sure didn't.

  Shake said, "Well, what would happen is, she would blow all those years I'd ever known her and loved her. She would piss me off about something that didn't make a shit and it would leave a scar and it would all be ruined."

  I thought that over for an interlude and listened to the soft background of Elroy Blunt singing "Tear Me a New One."