Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (8 page)

And no amount of false enthusiasm will make it better. As sympathetic as Mayfield is, he doesn’t care about Scotland: he cares about my knee. I call my father and tell him that I’m not going to be there, that I’m sorry. He tells me don’t be sorry, son. We love you. We’re proud of you. They go anyway and watch the Fire play the Claymores in our homeland. I watch the game alone at a sports bar in Alabama and get drunk. After it’s over I call the Shoney’s and Catman picks me up.

—What did the rooster say to the screwdriver?

—Not tonight, Catman.

—Oh, all right, Nate. All right.

The next day I become violently ill and shit and puke for twenty-four hours. I lose ten pounds and can’t go into rehab. I lie in my musty room festering like a wound in the heavy air of vomit and excrement and roll myself up into a sheet burrito and pray for the end of everything. I want the screen to go blank and end my misery once and for all. I sit on the toilet with a bucket in my hand, staring at my face in the full-length mirror hitched stupidly to the bathroom door. I don’t recognize myself. I’m a ghost, limping, bleeding, crawling after the sunset. Everything is wrong here. I’m dying. But turn around, boy. The sun also rises. Today makes unthinkable the thoughts of yesterday. The bug that squirmed in my body and tried to kill me was killed instead. I lick the blood from the blade and kick the corpse into a shallow grave as I step from my room at last.

—God damn it, boy. You look like shit.

M
ayfield.

—You should have seen me yesterday.

—Couldn’t have been much worse than today! Go and get some food in you. We’ll get to your rehab later. You need to get your weight up before I can clear you.

I spend the next three days in the HealthSouth cafeteria and the following day I’m on my way back to Germany. Mayfield has cleared me after a solid performance on the Biodex machine and a solid enough performance in the running portion of the evaluation. He tells me I better run like a scalded dog if I am going to get clearance. I do my best scalded-dog impersonation and all is right in the world. My knee isn’t really healed, but who cares? Nothing ever really heals. Not in football. Not in anything. I can deal with whatever not being 100 percent means but I can’t take another week in Birmingham. Things have gotten too heavy.

I’m convinced that the Shoney’s is haunted. My dreams are so intense I wake up exhausted. My movie date grows hostile toward me because of I don’t know what. Catman asks me if I can buy him a Snickers. Then he asks if I can give him money for his bills. A few days later he gets fired. Then rehired. Fights are breaking out between injured players in the back of the shuttle on the way to dinner, in the lobby of the hotel, at HealthSouth. Everything is in shambles. And it is not going to get any better. The Shoney’s Inn is firmly planted in the Birmingham dirt and NFL Europe injured life descends upon it like a plague. Mayfield has given me my freedom just in time.

I
arrive back in Germany to a different hotel and a far less enthusiastic team. We are 2-3 and a week earlier, had left the Relexa Hotel because of a convention in town. We will stay at a hotel outside Düsseldorf in Hamm for another week, then back to the Relexa for the last three weeks of the season. At the airport in Alabama I pick up some magazines to keep me company through the no-doubt sleepless few nights I will endure upon my jet-lagged arrival in Germany.

One is a
Playboy
. The cover girl is a Japanese woman named Hiromi. The liquid curve of her body, the obvious softness of her skin, her sweet smile and her raven hair: she jumps into the third dimension and sits down next to me and we watch late-night German television together for three nights. Late-night TV in Germany could be a naked woman holding a basketball and dancing next to a Cessna airplane, or a slapstick talk show, or three grown men wearing only socks and tennis shoes playing a two-on-one tennis match over house music. You never know.

Hiromi and I laugh for hours until we finally doze off into the half-dream, half-hallucinatory vacuum trance that seizes the jetlagged world traveler upon arrival. The dripping of my bathroom faucet careens off the walls of a vibrant mental cave and twists the dial on an ever-expanding ghost hunt, soliciting the expertise of myriad dust mites and molecular sponge-bath vermin to make my case before a stubborn queen. I’ve traveled all this way, my lady, to bring you this: I reach into my rucksack and pull from it a single violet stone: an amethyst. It twists in my fingers and catches the light just as—Bzzzzzzzzz. Alarm clock. The buzzing is in German and the queen has vanished. Hiromi is gone, too. It’s time to go to work.

I arrive in the middle of the week. Most of my teammates have already fallen out of love with Germany, and the fact that we have a losing record makes it easy to start counting down the days until it’s all over. I try to keep things in perspective for them by explaining the situation in Birmingham. I do the catcall and everything.

During a break from meetings the day before our game, Greg tells me there is some tension on the team after a recent incident at the hotel. There is a group of defensive players who played dominoes every night in the common area of our floor at the Relexa. Greg’s room opened up to that common area and every night, according to Greg, they slapped the dominoes down with gusto and laughed loud and made such a commotion that Greg was having a hard time sleeping. In fact, said Greg, he wasn’t sleeping at all. The rhythmic slapping of dominoes and laughter brought him to a boil. And repeated respectful pajama’d pleas to please quiet down and please just
put
the domino down instead of
slamming
it down because try try try as I have I cannot sleep when you guys are playing this loudly. It all went unheeded.

Then Greg’s girlfriend, Alissa, came to town. It’s one thing to deal with hell privately, but when your woman comes around and makes you feel like a punk for letting it happen, something has to be done. As they lay quietly in the dark, taunted by the clacking ivory, Alissa incited a riot.

—Say something, Greg.

—Believe me I have. They don’t care.

—Can’t you tell your coach?

—I’m not going to run and tell Coach.

—Well.
You have to do
something.

—What do you want me to do? I have to live with them.

—If you won’t do something, I will.

After dinner the next night, like every other night, the domino crew took their places, washed the bones, and plucked their seven apiece. Only it was three sevens and a six. One bone was missing. The whole skeleton was useless. Thus ensued the world’s most frantic Easter egg hunt. It’s the small things in Düsseldorf that allow men to Be Flexible without Going Postal. Abdual, the ringleader of the domino squad, soon came around to the idea that the game was sabotaged. And it didn’t take long to come up with a prime suspect: the white guy in room 207.

—Yo, man, you know what happened to our domino?

—Huh? Domino? What do you mean?

—You know what I mean, Greg. Someone took one of our dominoes.

—No. No idea. Are you sure you didn’t lose it?

—Naw, man, someone took it. You
sure
it wasn’t you?

—I wouldn’t do that, man. C’mon!

Propelled by the scent of Caucasian deceit, Abdual convinced the Relexa manager to let him review the security tapes.

Domino, mothafucka!

Sweet little Alissa, wearing a hooded jumpsuit, tiptoed into the hallway, glanced left and right as if crossing a dangerous street, stepped to the gaming table, and plucked the double five. She curled it in her fist and slid back into Greg’s room. But the eye in the sky does not lie. Armed with the visual evidence, Abdual returned to Greg’s room.

—All right, Greg, we checked the tape and we know you have it. We want it back.

—Yes, I have it and I’m not giving it to you.

—Dawg, you stole it. Coach is going to send you home for this shit.

—You’ve been stealing my sleep,
dawg.
Coach is sending
you
home!

Back and forth they went until eventually cooler heads prevailed. Greg returned the domino and Abdual promised to try to tone it down. But they are still in the trial run portion of the tone-it-down phase, and things are still testy.

But that’s not the only reason things are testy. Pete still has them beating the shit out of each other. Guys are tired and sore and all of that work isn’t translating to wins on game day. That’s when the rah-rah stuff can start to work against a coach. During training camp, we were the only team that practiced twice a day in full pads. The other teams were done by 1 p.m., hanging out by the pool and laughing at us as we limped off to another violent practice.

—No one is going to outwork us!

Well, fuck, Pete, what’s the point of working so damn hard if the dudes who were hanging out at the pool are beating us?

But he’s trying to turn us into a good team. He wants us to win. And his answer for every failure, as for a lot of football coaches, is to work harder. Whatever we were doing before, we’ll just do more of it. We’ll do it longer and harder and damn it, we’ll get it right.

The next day against the Amsterdam Admirals, we win the game and bring our record to 3-3.

On the bus ride back to the hotel, my friend tells me that he’s really looking forward to the few days off. He has a fantastic plan. He’s going to take a Viagra and masturbate all day. He’s my next-door neighbor at our hotel in Hamm. I make sure not to be there: hairy palms and such, oozing through the German walls, contaminating our house of purity.

T
he next week we take the train to Berlin to play the Thunder. We occupy a whole car and are required to wear our team-issued maroon Rhein Fire jumpsuits during transit. After losing the game, we get back on the train to go home. We are tired and losing sucks. I take off the jacket portion of my jumpsuit and have a white T-shirt on underneath. While I’m standing in the aisle talking to a few teammates, Whiskey Pete comes walking through the cabin.

—Where’s your jacket, Nate?

—It’s over there on my seat.

—Go put it on. What do you think this is?

—A train?

The next day I have an envelope in my locker. I open it. It’s a fine: two hundred dollars for improper road game attire. I guess “be flexible” only applies to the players.

We are back to the Relexa for the last three weeks of our journey. I catch a few passes in our next loss and am working myself back into the fold. But my hands are rusty. For four weeks in Alabama, there were no footballs around. One day after practice we make up a game—Adam, Greg, Chad, and me. There are soccer goals around the periphery of our field. One of the quarterbacks stands at the top of the penalty box and tries to throw the football past me into the net. The quarterback can work on his accuracy while throwing hard and I can work on my reaction and ball skills. Then we flip the drill and I step out to the top of the box and unleash the cannon. The weapon attached to my shoulder has sadly been relegated to recreational duty only, but every once in a while I like to light the wick and let the dragon breathe. I played the wrong position.

Back at the Relexa, I’m preparing for a visitor. Alina is coming to town for two weeks. We planned it months ago. When I first found out I was going to Germany, I was torn about how to handle it with her. We’ve been exclusive and devoted to each other but I have my doubts about all of it. I was shipped to Denver, then spent my first season in the NFL chained to my cell phone. And once you get started in on all the phone calls and text messages, it’s hard to go back. She wields the phone like a razor blade.

When she arrives, all sixty-six inches of her toned and tanned body, her doe eyes, and her bright, dimpled smile, she spends her first few days sleeping off the jet lag. I go down to the meal room in the morning, say “Guten Morgen” to as many people as I can, eat breakfast, then bring a waffle with Nutella upstairs to my slumbering sweetheart before leaving for work. She’ll fall in love with Nutella in Germany, just as I have. Above all things, Nutella is the best symbol of our relationship: sweet and delicious and since presented at dawn, seemingly nutritious, but altogether unhealthy.

Our second to last game of the season is in Cologne, a beautiful city with a cathedral near the train station. It’s enormous and incredibly ornate, each inch seemingly carved with a scalpel. I stand at its base, neck craned skyward, and think about every hand that went into building it, and every heart that believed it was doing God’s work. I snap some photos and keep walking.

Alina sits in the stands at the game with the other wives and girlfriends and poses for pictures, doing the cute-chick half-squat, hands on bent knees pose, with the field in the background. I play a lot and make a few improbable catches, courtesy of Greg, which make me feel like a wide receiver again. We lose, but no one really cares, myself included. It’s my time now. In a few weeks I will be back on U.S. soil lining up to run routes against our newly signed cornerback Champ Bailey (I read about it on the Internet) and wearing my Broncos uniform again. As far away from that reality as I am on the steps of a European cathedral, I know that very soon none of this shit will matter. Champ won’t be asking me about my time in Germany and Coach Shanahan won’t be asking to see the photos of the church.

The day before she leaves, Alina makes me a cake for my birthday and buys me balloons and a pair of black high-top Converse shoes. I’m turning twenty-five in Deutschland. Somehow she makes a cake with no kitchen. She’s crafty and sweet and caring. Too good for me. I’m a selfish professional football player, in constant pain and emotionally unavailable. That night a group of us dress up and go to a casino an hour away, in Dortmund. We look nice but not nice enough. They require a coat and we are coatless. We rent four of Germany’s finest discarded casino jackets at the door, buy cigars, order cocktails, and set the place on fire playing blackjack the American way: loud and risky.

Germans sit quietly and brood over their cards while Adam, Greg, Bret Engemann, and I bet recklessly and smoke and drink and raise a ruckus in our house jackets. The lady to my right curses me as I chase my perfect hand. She gathers her chips and storms off. We laugh and collect our winnings.