Semi-Tough (13 page)

All I know is, for the next hour, old Billy Clyde is gonna lay here in his lemon-lime bubble bath and write on his book and relax.

Maybe Cissy Walford will drop a young Scotch on me from time to time.

Now about last night.

We started out at the CBS cocktail party, which was semi-massive.

That was perhaps the high point because that's where
T.J.
Lambert did his number.

The party was held in the
Señor
Sombrero Cafe on the second floor of the hotel. It was a big L-shaped restaurant room, all glassed-in with a view of all of the smog from Sunset Boulevard down to little Santa Monica. It had a terrace outside the sliding glass walls, which hung out over one of the hotel swimming pools.

It used to be that players didn't go to parties like this because there was drinking and the coaches and the old commissioner, Pete Rozelle, frowned on it. Commissioner Cameron, however, took a more modern view when he came into office on the forty-eighth ballot. He said players were going to drink anyhow and he said they might as well drink in public because that way maybe they would drink less.

That holds true for some, I guess. But it doesn't hold true for somebody like
T.J.
Lambert.

The party which CBS gave was mainly for the National Conference people, which are their friends, and therefore there weren't any dog-ass Jets around, or any of their dog-ass fans.

What caused the trouble with
T.J.
Lambert, I think, was the fact that the CBS bars pretty quickly ran out of any decent Scotch and
T.J.
started drinking gin mixed with rum and brandy and tequila.

I remember Puddin Patterson telling him, "Say, cat, if you drink that kind of mess, you liable to catch a silver bullet before
this
night's over."

T.J.
has a big old pink freckled face and small squinty eyes, and he said,

"Shit, I've drink everything from dishwater to polio vaccine in my day, Daddy. I don't never kill nobody. And I don't never puke."

T.J.
Lambert is not the sort that anybody tells what to do, ever.

He had once been shot in the belly, point blank, by an irate husband. And all he did was drive himself to the hospital and recover. That was in the off-season once, back in Tennessee.

I personally saw
T.J.
beat up four cops one night in Dallas, the night before a game with the Cowboys. We had rented a car and driven out on the highway to a place called Dorine's Paradise, a country music place. We wanted to unwind a little, and take our minds off the game.

Coming back to the hotel, however,
T.J.
was driving and he started going across people's front yards and scraping the car o
f
f the sides of office buildings on the sidewalks.

Two squad cars finally hemmed us in on a neighborhood street. Fortunately the cops recognized us and put away their guns and offered to escort us back to our hotel and not say anything about it.

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 stre
tched out on a sofa with the cof
fee 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 and 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."