Semi-Tough

by Dan Jenkins

  Big Ed looked up at Jesus Harold and said:

  "Now tell us what you've got to eat."

  I was on Big Ed's side for once.

  Jesus Harold said, "On the menu, I'm sure the light in here is good enough for you to find a shrimp cocktail, a salad with roquefort, and a New York cut."

  Jesus Harold looked away while he was writing on his pad.

  "A little dish of vanilla for dessert?" he said. "All around?"

  Big Ed said for Jesus Harold to hold on there for a minute. He said he wasn't interested in any of the specials. And he didn't think any of the rest of us were. What we really wanted was some good beef. Nothing to start. Just bring us some more drinks and six good pieces of beef with maybe some asparagus and sliced tomatoes.

  "I don't suppose you've got a sixteen-ounce T-bone out there, do you?" said Big Ed.

  Jesus Harold said, "If we do, I will personally rope it and drag it out here."

  We all smiled at Jesus Harold, who wrote down our order. Or Big Ed's.

  "Thank you very much," said Jesus Harold. "I'll tell Jesus Barry to bring you another round of drinks."

  "Those are all medium rare," said Big Ed.

  "Of course they are," said Jesus Harold. "Life itself is medium rare."

  Our waiter left, straightening the cross on his back and clomping his sandals across the floor.

  The steaks weren't bad. Big Ed and Big Barb asked Cissy Walford several questions about her parents. They decided they knew some rich people her parents knew. Big Barb asked Barbara Jane if she had done several things to her apartment since they had last seen it.

  Big Ed discussed a number of things that were wrong with the current economy. He reviewed TCU's football season for us. They were three and eight. He also reviewed next season's prospects and said that one of TCU's problems was they had too many niggers on offense and a couple of Jesus Harolds in the secondary.

  As Big Ed always does, he proposed a toast when dinner was over and Jesus Harold had sent Jesus Barry around with some stingers. It was the same old toast.

  It was the toast where Big Ed says that you come into the world naked and bare, or something, and you go through the world with trouble and care. Then he says you go out of the world you know not where. But if you're a thoroughbred here, he says, getting louder, you're a thoroughbred there.

  Me and Shake and Barb have learned to listen to the toast with blank expressions. We raised our glasses again when Big Ed finished.

  And Big Ed said, "Goddamned if I don't love a thoroughbred in life. And we've got a whole table of 'em right here."

  Big Ed then spoke for a while on how he had molded most of our lives and helped us become thoroughbreds. Except for Cissy Walford, of course.

  He said her daddy, being a wealthy man, had probably done the same thing for her. He said he and her daddy had a lot in common. "Respect for the American dollar," he said. "What's good for America is good for the world," he said. "If the world stops believing that, we may have to kick 'em in their chink asses again," he said.

  Big Ed went through some of his fond memories about me and Shake and Barb. Big Barb joined in occasionally. Cissy Walford yawned once or twice.

  Big Ed said he couldn't be happier to have turned out such a handsome daughter who seemed to have all of her mother's good taste. He said he didn't understand some of her wit, but, hell, this was another generation.

  Only a couple of things had disappointed him, he said.

  He said he was sorry a few years ago that Barbara Jane had refused to become a Fort Worth debutante like her mother had planned it. Which would have been the exact same year her mother got herself elected president of the Assembly and the Junior League and the Republican Women for White Freedom — the triple crown, so to speak. The Assembly was a club that picked debutantes.

  Big Ed said he would have thrown a hell of a debutante party for Barb. He said he would have brought in Freddy Martin's orchestra and Bert Parks and a lot of other show biz celebrities that he knew.

  He said he was sorry, too, that Barbara Jane had gone lo TCU instead of a place like Mrs. Bellard-Ronald's in upstate New York. "I'm for TCU as far as our town's concerned," he said. "What the hell we got down there, other than a bomber plant and a bunch of goddamned apartment builders on the city council? But you can go too far with your loyalty. Barbara Jane should have gone off to a lady's school."

  "Clarice Stuart in Ironwood, Virginia, would have been perfect," Big Barb said.

  Barb said, "Terrific."

  Big Ed said his other major disappointment was when his very own daughter and some other girls got caught spending the night in the athletic dorm at TCU.

  "I never expected such a thing from a Bookman," said Big Ed.

  We began laughing.

  "I've never felt so destroyed," Big Barb said.

  Shake said, "It all worked out. It was a joke, anyhow."

  And Big Ed said, "You goddamn right it worked out. After I worked it out. I thought for a while I'd have to buy the Fort Worth Light & Shopper, and I'd just as soon own a dry hole in Egypt."

  "Bookman Heiress Shacks Up with Football Studs," said Barb, teasing. "Hell of a story. Aw, come on, Daddy. Jim Tom Pinch wouldn't have ever printed the story. You know that."

  "It's funny now, huh?" said Big Ed.

  "It's pretty funny, I think," I said. "That was some night. That was the night after the varsity picnic at Lake Worth. The spring before our junior season."

  Shake said, "The night we scuttled Bobby Roy Simpson's forty-footer."

  Barb said, "You mean the night Bubba Littleton did."

  "Well, Bubba did the work but I think it was our idea." Shake grinned.

  Big Ed said, "Wait a minute. Somebody sank somebody's boat that night?"

  Shake said, "It didn't matter. Bobby Roy Simpson was a rich kid who liked to hang around with the football studs. He had several boats."

  Big Ed said, "Well, I've got several boats myself but I'll be goddamned if I want anybody sinkin' 'em."

  Barbara Jane laughed and looked at us.

  "It didn't matter, Daddy. It really didn't," she said. "If you had known Bobby Roy Simpson, you would have sunk his boat with him in it."

  Big Ed said it still didn't seem right, somehow. A man's boat and all. A private property deal.

  Shake said, "I don't remember why we thought it would be all right to bring the girls back to Tom Brown Hall. It seemed like the thing to do, though."

  I said, "Wasn't that the same night that Bubba Littleton tore the pay phone out of the wall?"

  "Sure was," said Barbara Jane. "And threw the Coke machine down two flights of stairs. Double-header."

  Shake said, "Well, you know why he was so hot?"

  Me and Barb broke up. We knew.

  Bubba Littleton was hot because Honey Jean Lester had caught him that afternoon flogging it underneath the dock as I have mentioned earlier.

  "I don't see how any human being who's white could do things like that," Big Ed said.

  "He was just mad at his date about something," I said.

  "Well, Bubba Littleton wasn't a good enough football player at TCU to get away with things like that," Big Ed said. "Destroying property is what chinks and Commies want."

  "He was a pretty mean tackle," Shake said. "He'd hit somebody."

  I said, "He was about half-mean all the way around."

  Shake said, "How about those poor Aggies?"

  I wished Shake hadn't said that just when I had my young stinger up to my face. I nearly spit in it from laughing.

  On a Friday night in Fort Worth one time before a game we had against Texas A&M, Bubba Littleton went downtown to a pep rally the Aggie cadet corps was having because he wanted to get him some Aggies as captives, for a joke.

  I never knew any other TCU man who would go around an Aggie rally by himself. But Bubba of course could go anywhere he wanted to. He used to go look up truck drivers and try to get them to fight him to see who bought the beer.


  Anyhow, Bubba went downtown and got him four Aggie cadets and brought them back to his dorm room. The first thing he did was shave off all of their hair, what little they had, being Aggie cadets. Then he made them get naked and shave all the hair off of each other's bodies and vital parts.

  They were just scrawny little old Aggies whose daddies had made them go there in the first place, to Texas A&M, I mean, which is kind of like going to Sing Sing. So they couldn't do anything except what Bubba Littleton wanted them to do, not unless they wanted to get an arm broke.

  The next thing Bubba did was take some purple paint — purple is TCU's color — and make the Aggies stand at attention while he painted something on each one's chest. What he painted so that you could read it when they stood in a certain order was: AGGIES ... IS ... SEMI-... RURAL.

  Bubba finally let the poor souls go after they sang the TCU fight song to his satisfaction, and after they had a beat-off contest.

  We carried on a little more with Big Ed and Big Barb about our growing-up days.

  Big Ed said that one of the things which pleased him the most is that me and Shake and Barbara Jane had never needed any of his money.

  Like all rich guys, Big Ed said he didn't have a whole lot of money but that he had managed to keep some from the government. And he said it was always there if any of us ever needed it for something important.

  Big Ed said that what he planned to do with what little money he had, when he died, if none of us needed it for something important, was leave it to various things around Fort Worth, in his memory.

  He said he hoped TCU would take some of his money and upperdeck the entire stadium and call it Big Ed Bookman Coliseum.

  He said the family's first oil pump was still out in Scogie County but that he hoped the city would one day want to bring it to town and put it on the lawn of the Convention Center. He said it would be interesting history.

  "Who are you going to leave your heart to?" Barbara Jane asked in a wry way.

  Big Ed looked at Barb as if she was a Communist.

  "Big Ed's heart goes with Big Ed," he said. "That's just goddamn foolishness, giving up things like that."

  Big Ed said, "Wouldn't I be in a fine fix to come back on Earth some day without a goddamn heart?"

  Barbara Jane howled.

  "I don't want to talk about that kind of thing," said Big Ed. "I know everybody has different ideas these days. I just don't give one goddamn how many transplant cases are walking around healthy. They're supposed to be dead, like God wanted 'em to be."

  Shake said, "Damn right. If God wanted a man to have two hearts, he'd have given him two hearts. If God had wanted a man to drink more, he'd have given him two mouths."

  Big Ed said, "Go ahead and be funny about it. But I'll tell you this, Eighty-eight. You go out and get yourself a nigger's heart and then we'll see how many footballs you catch on Sunday."

  "Can you believe it?" said Barbara Jane, looking at us.

  Big Ed said we'd do well to listen to him. He said he guessed he would have to educate us, once and for all. Why in the hell did we think Barbara Jane was such a beautiful and great girl? Why was that?

  He said, well, he would explain it to us. By God, it was because she was a thoroughbred, he said. She came from good stock. Bookman stock. And don't think that didn't mean plenty, he said.

  Big Ed said that God wasn't so dumb that he didn't know there had to be a few people around in history to see that the world ran right.

  He said that God tried to turn it all over to mankind once and it just didn't work. A whole goddamn bunch of chinks and niggers got born, along with a whole lot of spicks and Mongol hordes. That pissed God off, he said. So God took over again and God's been trying to straighten it out ever since, without ruining his image.

  He said God would sneak a tidal wave in every now and then, or an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, and then a few wars, to get rid of several million undesirables outside of America.

  It's a slow process, Big Ed said, because it got so far out of hand, and God has to be careful and do it slowly, and not make everybody so hot they won't like God any more.

  Now then, he said, sipping on his stinger.

  While all of this has been going on, God has allowed some carefully selected people he could trust to get born and take rich and be able to run things.

  These are people, he said, like all of the great rulers and businessmen of history. Well, he said, they're people like the Murchisons and Hunts were, or like some corporation presidents he had known, and some generals, and himself.

  The Bookmans, he said, went back a long way. God sent the first Bookman over on the Mayflower to help get America started off right. The reason, he said, was because God knew that America would be able to get the rest of the world to shape up. Eventually. Like today.

  The Bookmans, he said, distinguished themselves in all of the wars, including his own self in World War II, which none of us could much remember, he guessed. The big war, where we kicked the shit out of those that had it coming, and did it right.

  He said that God obviously didn't want him to get killed in that war, basically because he had some big money to earn and some jobs to provide later on, and that's why God had given him the intelligence and the aristocracy to go into the army as a colonel at the age of twenty.

  He said God knew what he was doing when he worked it out that Big Ed got to stay in Washington, D.C., throughout the big war and help out with many of the important decisions that were made about who to kill next.

  Now then, Big Ed said again.

  One of the wonderful things that came out of him being preserved and not killed, as God had shown the good sense to do, was that he got to meet Big Barb in college when they were at the University of Texas, after the big war. Big Barb had come from a fine family herself, he said. The Huckabees from Waco, he said.

  And out of this union had come Barbara Jane, he said, with her hair of streaked butterscotch, her deep brown eyes, her olive complexion, her splendid cheekbones, her full lips, her perfect teeth, her big bright smile and her keen mind and, according to her mother, her flawless carriage and good taste and her incredible body.

  "It took a lot of Bookmans to produce that," said Big Ed in conclusion.

  "And one hell of a lot of earthquakes," said Barbara Jane.

  I SEE BY THE OLD EAST-WEST SHRINE GAME WRIST watch that it's about time for Billy Clyde to grab his eight or nine hours.

  The time is beginning to pass very slowly, I think. It's always this way before a big game.

  When I wake up it will be Saturday morning, and that's still another twenty-four hours before we can put on our hats and get after the dog-ass Jets in the biggest football game there is, the old Super Bowl.

  My plans for Saturday are to lay around a lot and rest my legs and not eat anything but steak and eggs and fruit, and maybe some wool.

  I may not even have more than a couple of drinks.

  Elroy Blunt of course is going ahead and having his party in the mansion he has rented for the weekend in Bel Air. That's where a lot of studs live out here who have fucked people out of some serious money.

  I guess we'll attend the party but just for a short while. Elroy said he would have some steaks for those of us who have a game to play and don't want to log up on eight or ten dozen barbecued ribs and beans and potato salad.

  Elroy said he was laying in a Mississippi River of Scotch, a Lake Michigan of vodka and an English Channel of beer. He said if anybody wanted anything to drink other than that, which he would not be able to understand or even tolerate, they could smoke dope instead.

  He said he had two footballs stuffed with the best grass any A-rabs could smuggle in.

  Elroy said he had invited several of his country rhythm picker friends, a couple of rock groups for dancing on the lawns, a few semi-starlets, and several debutantes for those who didn't have dates or wives, or even for those who did.

  He said there shouldn't be more than a hundred peop
le in all.

  He said he had taken the precaution to arrange for fourteen Cadillac limousines with TV's and telephones and bars in them to arrive at ten A.M. Sunday and ensure that everybody got to the Los Angeles Coliseum in time for the game.

  He said there would be two or three doctors on hand with B shots and Dex and penicillin to handle various things like hang-overs, fatigue and the clap.

  "You don't know about some of these debutantes," he said. "If they look a bit worn, you ought to take some penicillin just to eliminate the mental grief."

  Me and Shake told Elroy he sure was thoughtful of his guests. We asked what the whole thing was going to cost him.

  "Nowhere near as much as it ought to, considering the bigness of the occasion," he said. "I can probably get away for three or four thousand whip-out."

  Elroy said that would include tips for the debutantes.

  There was a minute or two in the living room of our palatial suite tonight — or last night, I should say, seeing as how it's almost two A.M. — when Barbara Jane and I talked about my literary effort. And about ourselves.

  She said she had now listened to everything I'd spoke up to a day ago and she said she thought it was still semi-honest and half-funny.

  ut she said she thought it was a little embarrassing for her own self.

  "I think you make me sound like a goddamn priceless emerald or something," she said.

  "I'm going to tell Jim Tom to tone me down with some editing. In terms of the characterization of Barbara Jane Bookman, you are writing what they say in the magazine business is an all-out, no-holds-barred, hard-hitting puff."

  I told her that if Jim Tom Pinch changed anything drastic about her, I'd see to it that he wound up his career writing bowling scores. Got that, Jim Tom?

  Barb put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me, gentle like. Then she wrapped her arms around my waist and put her head on my chest.

  I held her there for a while, with my chin resting on top of her streaked butterscotch hair, which was parted in the middle and hung down quite a ways, soft, straight and pretty.