Life Its Ownself (5 page)

"Hello, Billy," the man said, sticking out his hand. "I'm your dad."

Before I could speak, Shake said, "What's your name?"

"Steve." The man looked blankly at Shake. "Steve Puckett."

"What was his mother's name?" Shake gestured.

"Dalene."

"What street did you live on in Fort Worth?"

Steve stammered.

"Uh.. .Travis. Then over on Hemphill."

"Could be him."

Barbara Jane folded her arms as she studied Steve. She said, "Sir, I'm sorry, but I've known Billy Clyde's mother and father a long time. They're both named Kenneth."

Out of embarrassment for Steve, I led him aside, seeing no reason to subject him to Shake and Barbara Jane's wise-mouth.

We had a brief visit. He said he was proud of me. He said he followed my "dipsy-dos" in the newspapers. He said he had meant to write several times over the past fifteen years, but things had been hectic in the floor-covering business. He said he'd bought a new set of MacGregor irons and they had lowered his handicap to 12.

He glanced around the lobby at my teammates, some of whom were black.

"How you get along with the nigs?"

"Fine," I said. "They're good guys."

"Nigs is?"

"Yeah."

"Don't steal nothin'?"

"No."

"Don't even borrow nothin'?"

"No. I borrow some of their albums."

He said, "Lord, I seen one the other day that gimme a pause. He was one of your hippie nigs? He stood there on Wilshire Boulevard and took a piss in broad daylight!"

"No fooling?"

"Yep, right there on Wilshire Boulevard. I said to myself, Well, is this the end of civilization as we know it, or is it just another nigger pissin' on Wilshire Boulevard?"

"It's a great country."

My dad apologized for having been semi-halfway responsible for making me the victim of a broken home.

I said he didn't need to apologize for a single thing. Uncle Kenneth had given me everything I'd needed, plus a good many laughs.

He said, "Billy, I was sorry to hear about your mother. I never wanted her to bogey eighteen. I did root for a sore throat from time to time. Damn, she had a temper."

"You got married again, didn't you?"

"Twice," he said, sheepishly. "Learned my lesson. Cora burned my name in the eighteenth green at Rancho Park. Eileen threw a brand-new set of Pings in the ocean—can you believe that?"

My dad was killed two years later. You could make him sound like he was a successful businessman if you said he got killed in a private-plane crash. The fact is, he got killed on the golf course where the private plane crashed.

He hadn't been able to get his Titleist 4 and Wilson wedge out of a sand trap in time to avoid a Cessna that lost power and suddenly dropped out of the smog and made the bunker a little deeper.

Old Steve was no big authority on relationships, but that morning in the Century Plaza lobby, he left me with some words I never forgot.

"Billy, I ain't too smart or I wouldn't be trying to sell cork tile," he had said. "I know you play a tough sport. You got them big, mean tackles comin' at you. But I'll tell you one thing about life. You ain't took no lumps at all till you've tried marital discord."

Given the mood I was in while I floundered in the hospital bed for a week, you couldn't blame for me for the ludicrous things I thought about.

I spent days watching elderly patients creeping past my room, and I wondered how many of them would be shuffled into a nursing home where they'd live out their days playing dominoes until they swallowed the double-6, believing it to be an Oreo cookie.

I tried to estimate how many patients might be dying of malpractice because of my floor nurse. She continually looked flustered and said things like "This God-damn place is comin' down over my ears!"

But mostly I thought about all of the obstacles life puts in the way of marriage.

There in my room at Lenox Hill—me, my knee, and a mound of magazines and newspapers—I pondered the fact that I was now in my thirties and I only knew two couples who hadn't been divorced or estranged.

One couple was Barbara Jane's parents, Big Ed and Big Barb Bookman. They had exchanged some sharp language, but they would never entertain the idea of divorce for two reasons. First, it would be socially inconvenient, and second, it would take Big Barb and her lawyers the rest of their lives to dig up West Texas and find all of Big Ed's money.

Big Ed once said, "Show me a woman who wants a divorce, and I'll show you a beady-eyed lawyer comin' out of her closet!"

The other couple was T. J. and Donna Lambert. They would never split up because they both liked Stouffer's chicken pot pies.

But almost every guy I'd ever known had been married two, three, and four times, most often to an undiscovered actress or airline stewardess—er, excuse me, flight attendant.

This didn't include Shake Tiller. He had been on record for years as saying he would rather be confined to a Syrian prison than have to discuss furniture ads with a female roommate.

Dump McKinney came to mind with no trouble. I thought of how he might just as easily have fumbled the handoff to me the way he had fumbled all of his marriages, in which case I'd still be playing football. I wouldn't be in a hospital trying to read a story in People magazine about a meditative movie actor who recommended tofu with sage as an alternative to a heavy Thanksgiving dinner.

Dump McKinney held one pro football record that would never be touched. He married three flight attendants and two Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. I learned of his fifth marriage and fifth divorce one evening watching television.

It had come to the attention of
60 Minutes
that the progressive city of Dallas had spawned a flurry of drive-in divorce centers in which lawyers were handling as many as 175 quickie divorces a day. I was watching the program when who should pop onto my screen but a disheartened Dump McKinney and his new ex-wife, Cheryl.

"I can't explain it," Dump said to the camera, his head drooping sadly. "I thought we were the two happiest people in the world."

The TV reporter turned to Cheryl. "How long were you married?"

"Three days."

"
Three days?"
said the reporter, trying not to laugh. "What can go wrong in only three days?"

Cheryl ran a brush through her long blond hair, and said, "We just didn't have nothin' in common."

Love was brutally outnumbered. That's how I saw it in the hospital that week. Maybe love could hold his own during depressions and wars, but if you gave people a little money and leisure time, love was in deep shit.

I made a list as I lay in the hospital bed. There wasn't much else to do but glower at the cast on my leg or watch vampires make rock music on cable TV.

As I observed it, love was forced to go up against the following enemies:

•
        
The insane cost of living.

•
        
The stranglehold of analysts.

•
        
Male-chauvinist jerks.

•
        
Male-chauvinist feminists.

•
        
Liberated wenches.

•
        
Bizarre sexual demands.

•
        
No sex at all.

•
        
His or her lack of political "awareness."

•
        
Whiskey.

•
        
Recreational drugs.

•
        
Born-again.

•
        
Porsche overhauls.

•
        
Rumors.

•
        
Gossip.

•
        
Confidant fags.

•
        
Overly familiar barmaids.

•
        
People "preoccupied with success."

•
        
Partners "suffocating" for undisclosed reasons.

•
        
Partners who have stomped on all the magic.

•
        
People who change.

•
        
People who refuse to change.

•
        
Architectural Digest.

•
        
Pornography.

•
        
Bumper stickers ("NUKE THE FAG WHALES FOR JESUS").

•
        
Office flirtations.

•
        
Jogging.

•
        
Business travel.

•
        
Dinner parties.

•
        
Sports on TV.

•
        
No-smoking areas.

•
        
Discos.

•
        
Cold pasta salads.

•
        
Betamax.

•
        
Bloomingdale's.

•
        
Perrier.

•
        
Ingmar Bergman.

•
        
She's too "assertive."

•
        
He's not "supportive" enough.

•
        
Numbing boredom.

And...

•
        
"I'm a person, too, you selfish mutant!"

There was a time when Barbara Jane would have agreed with me that none of those things could have affected us. We were too clever. And then some of them
did
affect us— and there we were, as human as everybody else.

Nothing in our history had indicated we would ever become human. If anything, the opposite was true.

Barbara Jane and Shake Tiller and I had known each other since the third grade. It was in the third grade that we had formed our own private club, a society dedicated to laughing at life its ownself.

We began by laughing at the things other kids put in their sandwiches at Daggett Elementary.
Chunky
peanut butter? Then we laughed at everybody's clothes, and everybody's parents. I suppose you could say it got out of hand because everything after that seemed humorous, especially anything serious, except Barbara Jane didn't laugh much about Kathy Montgomery later on.

Growing up, the three of us developed the same outlook on learning, achieving, surviving. We came to share the same beliefs about all the big stuff. Observing grownup behavior, I suspect, had more to do with it than anything.

We agreed you had an obligation to take whatever you were blessed with in life and try to keep a shine on it.