by Bill Syken
HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH
It is a phrase designed to mess with my mind. Here’s to your health, so soon after the shooting. Who the hell did this?
CHAPTER 10
I CONSIDER CALLING the police about the break-in, but I do not want to bring Rizotti into this. Judging by the news, his investigation is not making any progress, and I am not going to give him an excuse to focus his attention on my personal life.
But I also need to get out of this apartment tonight.
I call Freddie, who is at his beach house in Longport, New Jersey. Without any explanation, I ask if I can stay there tonight, and he replies “Sure” in a pouty tone that suggests he is not in the best frame of mind himself.
Minutes later, I am in the Jefferson’s underground parking garage, with my eyes on a swivel as I walk to my car. I half hope my attacker will pop out from behind a parked SUV, and then I can at least see his face, after which I can beat on it until my fist is covered in blood. But no such luck, which does not surprise me. If the vandal wanted to ambush me, he could have just waited for me in my apartment, having already taken the trouble to break in.
Although the thing is, no one literally broke in. My door and lock showed no signs of being pried. The perpetrator simply entered—most likely with a swipe card.
I wonder about the guys downstairs. They can make swipe cards in a matter of seconds with a machine at the front desk. At the wages those guys earned, I imagine they can be easily bribed.
I also consider the Tolley clan. They are in the building. They have come all the way from Kansas to support their man. I can imagine them deciding that some low-rent vandalism will get into my head, even more than the shootings already have.
That would be beyond bush league, more juvenile than anything I’ve encountered in pro football. But the way the last couple of days have gone, I can believe in unexpected lows.
* * *
I arrive at Freddie’s house toward the eight o’clock hour, with the ocean winds bringing a chill to the evening. Freddie lives right off the protective dunes, in a sleek, modern two-story construction whose white walls blend easily into the beachfront. I enter through the pool deck on the beach side of the house; Freddie always keeps that door unlocked. The home’s front has an impressive arched doorway, but I have never seen anyone use it in the three years I have been coming here.
I find Freddie in the living room, in what I recognize as coping mode. He is wearing a black silk full-length kimono and playing Wii bowling on his plasma television. On the coffee table—made from a cross-section of an old-growth tree—sits a half-eaten pizza, still in its delivery box. Freddie’s long hair is unkempt, spread haphazardly across his narrow shoulders. The odor of marijuana greets me before he does.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he answers distractedly, his eyes trained on the video screen as he lines up his next roll.
It is actually video games that brought Freddie and I together. I don’t own a console, but the team lounge at the Sentinels facility is outfitted with both a PlayStation and an Xbox, and I spend a great deal of time in there, as punters often do: while the offense and defense are at work, specialists are left to their own devices. You can only kick so many practice balls and lift so many weights. One afternoon I was playing FIFA soccer with Pablo Garza, the Sentinels kicker, when Freddie strolled into the lounge, took a seat in a recliner, and declared, “I’ve got next.” Thus a beautiful friendship was born. I soon noticed that, despite his vice president’s title, Freddie had even less to do around the Sentinels facility than I did.
Tonight Freddie is stoned and in a bad mood, but he isn’t letting it affect his game. His score is 191 in the eighth, and he is working off a strike from the last frame. He is on track for a personal high score. He needs two pins for a spare.
“Fuck!” Freddie yells after his roll leaves one pin standing. Then he shakes out his hands, turns to me, and says, “So who was that girl you are getting all cozy with on a park bench yesterday?”
“What?” I am confused. “How do you know?”
“I saw it on Internet, pal,” Freddie says. “In case you haven’t realized it yet, you’ve gone from being the fifty-third most famous player on the Sentinels to the second. Which means that if you go snuggling up to some woman out in public, someone is going to snap your picture, and that picture is going to end up online, and every nitwit in the world is going to see it. Exhibit A: me.”
Freddie pauses the game and fetches his laptop, a glistening new widescreen Mac that he left sitting on the far corner of the sectional sofa. He clicks a few buttons and turns the screen around to show me a photo of Melody and me in that park with the champagne bottle at our feet. She is leaning in with a devilish grin and holding her whoopie pie inches from my lips. The BUSTIN’ LOOSE lettering across her chest gains no more dignity through the medium of still photography. The headline reads: “Punter Parties on Day After Shooting.”
I would guess that not even ten people had walked by that little park when Melody and I were there. But all it takes is one person with a smartphone and a misguided sense of what constitutes an opportunity.
“How is this even a story?” I wonder. “Can’t a guy just celebrate being alive?”
“Get used to it, buddy,” Freddie say. “You’re going to be in the news, at least until they have JC behind bars.”
Huh. So Freddie is part of Jai’s hanging crew, too.
“I bet you ten bucks Jai didn’t do it,” I say.
“I bet you ten million dollars he did,” Freddie says. “Here’s some inside information for you, Hangman. Jai Carson is broke. Actually, broke would be a step up for him. He’s in debt. Deep. Seven figures, from what I understand.”
Amazing. Over his career, Jai must have made more than $100 million in salary and endorsements. Couldn’t he have taken say, two million, and salted it away for when his playing days are done—even if it meant not buying the car from Hustle & Flow?
“But so what if Jai’s broke?” I say. “What does that have to do with shooting Samuel?”
“It explains his motive, for one,” Freddie says. His posture became more erect as he elaborates. “You should have seen Jai after Samuel’s contract terms were announced. He was in our offices that afternoon, screaming bloody murder—pardon the expression. Even before Samuel signed, he was pressing us to renegotiate his deal and get an extension so he could have a new signing bonus and get that one big check right away. But no one wants to extend JC at this point in his career. He’s thirty-one. He’s got maybe a couple good years left, and he’s already under contract for them. So why should we sign him to when he’s nearly forty and won’t be able to do a damn thing?” Freddie shakes his head. “What does he think this is—baseball?”
Freddie seems unaware that he is embodying the sort of managerial coldness that would stoke Jai’s rage—or that might cause offense to me, a fellow player. He swings his arm back and rolls a virtual strike, sending the video game pins tumbling. He reaches over for a high five. I leave him hanging.
“Anyway,” Freddie continues, “Jai kept going on and on about how we are giving all this money to a rookie who hasn’t even put on the uniform yet, but we are fucking over the player who has been carrying the franchise for a decade. He says he is going to hold out. And we pretty much dared him to. If he was being fined for every day of camp he missed, he could see how much that helped his money troubles.
“Jai was so mad, he was sputtering. He could barely get his words out. He’s barking about how Samuel will never be worth half as much to the franchise as he is, and that Samuel is taking money that should be his. And think about it: if Jai is saying this to us, can you imagine what he’s saying to his buddies when he’s out on the town? And of course, his buddies keep telling him that he’s right, and so he gets even more pissed off. JC and his crew had it in for Samuel before he ever walked into that restaurant. Then they try to be nice to Samuel, and he goes ahead and acts like he doesn’
t know who JC is? Disrespects the legend? Come on.”
Freddie has the game on pause and he is rubbing his right elbow. It is his recurring Wii injury. When Freddie feels pain, he does not play through it.
“That’s interesting, but it’s not proof,” I say. “Just today Jai was running voluntary linebacker workouts at his house.”
“So?” Freddie asks.
“If he’s angry about his contract, he’s channeling it,” I say. “He’s getting ready to play his ass off.”
“When you talk about something not being proof,” Freddie says, “that, my friend, is not proof. And now that I’ve solved this week’s murder of the century, I’m getting back to more important shit.”
He takes the bowling game off pause. I look over at the pizza box. Freddie, even though he operates without any dietary restrictions whatsoever, was considerate enough to order a wheat-crust pie with mushroom and spinach toppings—my favorite. I pull off a slice, only realizing as it nears my mouth how hungry I am. I quickly devour that slice, and then a second.
Freddie rolls a strike in the ninth but stumbles in the tenth, getting only a spare and then eight pins with his extra roll. His final score: 243, which earns him the number-six spot on the game’s list of high scores. Freddie registers it under his initials: FAG, for Frederick Abraham Gladstone. This was one regard in which Freddie’s father had not made his life easy.
FAG holds all the game’s high scores except for the number-one position. The top spot belongs to NPG, as in Nicholas Parker Gallow (Parker is my mother’s maiden name). Back in February, I spent a long weekend out here, and one snowy day Freddie and I staged an all-day bowling marathon. On what we agreed beforehand would be the final game, I uncorked a perfect 300, which I had never come close to in any of my previous efforts. I then shook Freddie’s hand and told him I was retiring from Wii bowling.
Freddie and I played many games—mostly Ping-Pong, pool, and tabletop shuffleboard, all of which he has here in his basement—and the result was almost always the same. That is, I won. Freddie isn’t a terrible player, particularly at table tennis, where he can put a mean spin on his serve. But winning is a skill too. I can control my nerves in front of 60,000 people; Freddie chokes when he and I are alone in his game room.
Freddie drops down next to me on the sectional and turns his attention toward his marijuana pipe, a simple wooden piece he bought years ago in Panama. He pulls a plastic bag from his robe pocket and repacks the bowl. His weed smells like pine needles.
“Funny thing is,” Freddie says, “with Samuel gone, we’re actually better set up to give JC an extension now. Were we so inclined.” He laughs. “Drive-by murder. It’s a novel way to clear cap space.”
Freddie waves a lighter over his pipe and inhales gently, drawing a lazy sizzle from the bowl. I hop up and step to the other side of the room before he exhales, so I don’t end up with his smoke in my bloodstream, especially since the team’s off-season drug tests hadn’t come around yet.
Freddie is well aware that I like to keep my head out of his clouds, too. Usually he makes a point of keeping his distance, often slipping off to the pool deck and blowing his smoke out to the Atlantic. But not tonight.
“Something bothering you, Freddie?” I ask.
He picks up a toothpick and swirls the half-burnt weed around the bowl. “I have to go to Alabama in a couple days,” he says grumpily. “For the Samuel Sault funeral. That should be a blast.”
“Why you?”
“Orders from Dad,” Freddie says with an eye roll, slumping deeper into the sectional. “He’s in Macao. So he needs me to go and represent the family.”
He flicks his lighter and takes another hit.
“You’ll do fine at the funeral,” I say. “You’ll show up, you’ll look good, you’ll say the right things, you’ll be back here by nightfall. Doing exactly what you’re doing right now, if you feel like it.”
“Visualization techniques, Hangman?” says Freddie, and curls his upper lip in disapproval. “Really?”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
Freddie shakes his head. “So tell me about the girl with the whoopie pie,” he says, sitting up a little. “Where did she come from?”
I explain how I met Melody at Stark’s. Freddie looks up toward the ceiling. “Melody … Melody … I wonder if I know her?” Freddie has many women out here—telling them that he is the son of a billionaire and owns a beach house with a hot tub seems to work wonders with the ladies. “I don’t remember any Melody.”
“Good,” I say.
“Though I do lose track sometimes.”
“I would, too, in your shoes.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” Freddie grins. “You’d remember every single one—first name, last name, hometown, childhood pet. But anyway. After that whoopie in the park, Hangman, what happened next?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“Why not?” he asks, standing up.
“Too soon.”
“Too soon after what?”
“The shooting. Remember?”
Freddie shrugs. “Did you go to the bathroom yesterday? I bet it wasn’t too soon to perform that physical function.”
“C’mon, Freddie,” I say. “She was kind of cool.”
“Cool?”
“I like her.”
“Like her?” Freddie asks, incredulous. “Ms. Bustin’ Loose?” He circles the table and stands in front of the television screen. “See, Hangman, this is your problem in a nutshell,” he says, pipe in hand. “I bet it means you think you’re sophisticated. No, it doesn’t. It means you’re chickenshit.”
“But…”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Freddie says. “I would love to see you in a real relationship. You know how every now and then you will hook up with one of those businesswomen who stay at your residential hotel there?”
“Yes?”
“You should hear yourself tell me about these women, how admiring, how infatuated you sound when you describe them. And after they leave Philadelphia and go back to their regular lives, you’re grumpy for a week. You don’t even know it, but trust me, you are. And I can tell by the way you keep going back to that housewife artist—what’s her name?”
“Jessica.”
“Jessica. And it sounds like you’ve got a great thing going there. That’s your move, if you ask me. You should ask her to marry you.”
“I think her husband might have a problem with that.”
“A-ha!” Freddie says, pipe raised triumphantly.
“A-ha what?”
“That’s the first objection you raise, that she has a husband,” he says. “It’s not anything about her personality.”
“So?”
“So if after three years of road testing, that’s your only problem, I think you may have found your mate.”
“Smoke some more pot, Freddie,” I say. “You’re seeing everything really clearly.”
Freddie puts down the pipe and pulls his hair back, attempting to neaten himself. “She and her husband don’t have any kids, right?”
“No kids.”
“So this artist woman is basically single, save for some paperwork.”
Never mind that he has never even met Jessica. Freddie tends to believe that he can intuit the truth about anything, no matter how few actual facts he is working with. He really would make a fine lawyer.
“Take my word for it, Freddie,” I say. “It’s just not happening.”
“Yuh-huh,” Freddie says. “Three years. Something’s happening.” He gives up neatening his hair and returns to his bowling, starting up a new game. In between my heckles (“Don’t blow it here, pal. You wouldn’t want to miss this to the left … oooh, too bad”), I take Freddie’s laptop and click back to the site that has the photo of Melody and me. The story is on the indefatigable news site Footballmania.com, which has a separate blog devoted to the latest developments in the Samuel Sault case.
As I look through the Samuel-related stories, one catch
es my eye, titled “Carson’s Hometown Known for Gang Murders, Retribution.” The reporter interviewed characters from where Jai grew up, in a rough part of Memphis, and details a universe of single-parent homes where murder was common and young men gravitated toward gangs to find a sense of family. The story made the case for Jai’s guilt, in its way, by offering as an excuse the environment he was raised in. This seemingly sympathetic incrimination-by-poverty was at least balanced out by one quote from a high school assistant coach who knew Jai and wasn’t having any of it: “Jai Carson came from here, but when you look around, you see what he’s transcended. A gangbanger is exactly what he’s worked so hard not to become. And he’s not going to throw his life away because some kid didn’t know his name.”
The man this coach describes is the same one I ran the hill with this afternoon.
I scroll through the other news stories and I begin to understand how my trip to the park became a headline. Reporters are scrambling for any way to get in on the story. I see one preposterous article that evaluates the eleven quarterbacks that Samuel had injured for their potential as murder suspects. The story goes through the players one by one, attempting to account for their whereabouts on the night of the murder. I read the story not because I buy into its premise, but because I am always curious to see what becomes of football players when the game doesn’t need them anymore. In this case, though, the ex-quarterbacks hadn’t had a chance to become much, as they were all quite young. A few are still in school, while others are going to graduate school or are working pedestrian jobs.
The reporter located nine of the eleven injured quarterbacks. Five guys had strong alibis—“I was at the senior prom—chaperoning,” says David Pleasance, whose tibia was snapped by Samuel and who is now a middle school teacher in Shreveport, Louisiana. Four offered weaker accounts of their whereabouts that night, but could be located in places geographically inconvenient to South Philadelphia. “I was at home, on the Internet,” said Peter Barbaro, who had his elbow dislocated by Samuel and is now installing drywall part-time in Jacksonville, Florida. “Check with my provider if you want. But don’t ask what sites I was on, okay?”
