Semi-Tough (2 page)

From somewhere again in the back of the room, a spook voice said, "Say, Puddin. You know what a Texan is?"

Puddin half-turned around.

He laughed and said to the room, "Cat done told me it was a Mexican on his way to Oklahoma."

Shake laughed.

"Here's all I mean. If any of us get the red ass about something, then we ought to talk it over among ourselves without any goddamn agitators or business agents telling somebody he ought to be a flanker instead of a guard. Or he ought to be doing more hair spray commercials."

Shake looked down at Puddin.

"I'm gonna catch the football and run like a nigger,
Puddin. You gonna block yourself white?"

Puddin didn't say anything.

"I can't help it because the Old Skipper up there put some niggers in the world, Puddin," said Shake. "I guess if we all had our choice we'd be rich, white, handsome and able to tap-dance. What I
can
help, though, is acting like I don't know any of you are
here
."

"We here, baby," somebody said.

Shake said, "To tell you the truth, I'm not eaten up with any goddamn hundred years of guilt about you sum
-
bitches. You're just guys to me. And athletes. We've got to trust each other and be honest. And get drunk together, and get fucked together. That's the only way we can win together."

Shake paused a minute and stared at Puddin.

"Are we gonna win together?" Shake said.

Puddin slowly smiled and said:

"You want to know somethin', baby? I believe a cat could hang around with you and get hisself some white pussy."

There was honest laughter all around.

After a minute Shake said, "I just don't think a team has to have the kind of trouble that some other teams have had between spooks and everybody else. I just think we all ought to work to have a winner and if there's anybody around here who doesn't want to do that, then he can move his ass down the road."

Puddin said, "Everybody wants that, baby, but you sound like you think that if we don't win, it's gonna be the cats that fucked it up. You dig that?"

Shake grinned and said, "That's because we all know how lazy you folks are. Shit, we all know you'll quit a stream after two catfish. Right?"

Shake said he didn't have much else to say. He just wanted to bring it all out instead of keeping it buried, about feelings and all, and who everybody was, seeing as how most niggers were darker than whites.

Puddin finally said, "Say, I been thinkin' what movie star I want to be after I done took rich and blocked myself white. I believe I'll try bein' that cool Robert Redford cat. He looks like he could get hisself some good wool if he put his mind on it."

Shake said, "And I think I'll be that Sidney Poitier cat so I can cut all of your asses with white chicks."

I am white, of course. That's only important when you consider that I run with the football.

I'm white, stand about six two
—
just under
—
and weigh about two eighteen. If you're interested in what else I look like, my nose is slightly bent from catching a few licks and I've got about seventeen hundred dollars worth of teeth in my mouth that I wasn't born with.

There are those who say I have a warm smile and don't look mean off the field. My eyes are what you call your hazel, I guess. I don't tan so good in the summer. Just turn sort of light khaki.

I've got some shaggy hair that covers up most of my ears and hangs down in back, just below the bottom of my helmet. Barbara Jane Bookman says I can't keep my hair combed with a yard rake. It's dark brown. My
hair, I mean. Not Barbara Jane.

I'm a neat dresser on game days. I keep my socks pulled up and I don't wear my hip pads on the outside of my jersey. I don't wear wrist bands or elbow pads, and I don't jack a lot of tape around on my low-quarter shoes.

The reason it's important that I'm white and play running back is that most of the great runners in history have been spooks. It used to be said that if a white stud came along who was as strong as Jim Brown and as quick as Gale Sayers, he could get richer than the Mafia playing football. I suppose I'm just about that person.

Old Billy Clyde's salary is up there in big figures now, and if you lump three years together, it's a real ass
-
tickler. I don't mean to sound like I'm bragging but I've been told to talk about myself in this book so that the casual followers of the game as well as the non-football readers would know something about me. That's what I'm doing in all honesty.

It turns out that I was a total All-America back in my college of TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. And so was my good buddy Shake Tiller, who has written the pilot film on split ends.

My running comes natural is the only way I can explain it. It seems that when I get a football in my arms I have a tendency to not get tackled so easy. I can't truly make it very clear about my life-chosen craft. But what I'm getting at is that even today after five years in the NFL when our quarterback, Hose Manning, squats back of the center and hollers out a play like, "Red, Curfew, Fifty
-
three, Sureside, hut, hut, hut," then what I mean is, if I get the ball, I have a serious tendency to turn into some kind of Red fuckin' Grange.

That almost takes care of me. Except that what I was leading up to is that I have carved out a special place for myself in football history by being a white pisser.

Shake Tiller has said that if I was black I would not be thought of so much as any kind of hell and it would hurt me in the pocketbook. He's probably right. I wish that I was black sometimes, not because it would make me any faster, but because a lot of my buddies on the Giants are spooks who don't really enjoy being spooks. I don't think I'd let the world jack me around so much if I was a spook, but then I can't actually say.

This has just reminded me of the first time me and Shake ever realized, deep down, that spooks weren't so bad. It was when we were freshmen at Paschal High and we were showering one afternoon after practice with some spooks.

Where we grew up, you never came in contact very often with many cats. Only at track meets, or in ball games, and never very many even then. You never said much to any of them, except, "Good lick," or something like that.

In Fort Worth the spooks all lived somewhere other than where your friends did. They certainly hung out at different drive-ins. I suppose we grew up thinking that a spook who could mow the lawn or get a job caddying had a better deal than most spooks could expect.

Something like that.

Anyhow, me and Shake were showering one afternoon and these cats came into the squad shower room with us. We just nodded to each other. We didn't know their names, only that they got bused in and played basketball pretty good.

If anybody had asked us
—
a couple of fifteen-year-old smart-asses
—
what their names were, we'd have probably said they were Isiah T. Washington and Clarence Er-Ah Teague.

After a few minutes, Shake said, loud enough for the spooks to hear, "Hey, Billy C., we been under this sprinkler for a long time and there ain't no smoke come off these Indians yet."

I said, "I guess that means we can't get contaminated or anything."

We were grinning.

One of the spooks looked over at us and said to his buddy, "Coach he say he promise this soap wash this grease right off me. Shit."

The other one said, "Yeah, Coach he say to scrub hod. I say er-uh I scrubbin' hod as I kin."

And they laughed.

Nobody said anything else.

We turned out to be pretty good pals with those two cats before we got out of high school. One of them had a hell of a fallaway jump shot.

I think it's fair for me to say that me and Shake never had anything against a spook of any kind
—
except for the ones which raised so much hell on the TV news. Everybody hates any shit-ass that raises so much crap on TV that it knocks off your favorite show because a network thinks it has to do a special on all the hell that's being raised.

A spook that didn't raise any hell was O.K. with us, we thought.

And that's really no joke that you hear. They can solid fuckin' dance, I'll tell you that. Nearly every one.

I have been so carried away trying to begin this book that I've forgotten to tell anybody why I'm writing it, or how it is getting itself written. I guess I ought to explain it so it will give me a semi-clear conscience with my teammates.

The main reason I'm writing the book is because I got talked into it by an old newspaper friend in Texas. His name is Jim Tom Pinch and if you've ever poked through a garbage can in Fort Worth, you may have seen his daily column, "Pinch's Palaver."

Jim Tom persuaded me that it might be good for a pro football stud to have a book which might have a healthy influence on kids. He also said he would help me with it.

People keep saying that kids are the hope of the world, and maybe even Texas. If that's true
—
and they're not all a bunch of vagrants
—
then I suppose I'm doing something worthwhile. Not to get too serious about it, but it might be true what Jim Tom says. That my ideas on football and relationships between athletes could help change the minds of several little old Southern motherfuckers whose families have taught them to hate niggers, hebes, Catholics and whores.

The other reason for the book is that I happened to scare up a publisher in New York who was enthusiastic enough about it to give me a whole lot of what you call your up-front whip-out. Which is a shitpot full of cash, is what it is.

I hope the publishing company of LaGuerre & Koming won't mind me mentioning their generosity. All I did was, I asked Shake Tiller if he knew a book publisher that liked to win Nobel prizes. He told me LaGuerre & Koming had published a lot of great authors, so I phoned them up. I asked them for the editor they had with the most hyphens in his name.

I got hold of a real nice fellow who drew up the deal in exchange for nothing more than an autographed football and a promise.

I'm sure I don't need to be telling anybody this. It just helped me to say it out loud, because of the team.

How I am writing the book is sort of funny, I think.

What I'm doing right now is sitting on my ass in me and Shake's palatial suite here at the Beverly Stars Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. I'm just sitting here on a sofa with my feet propped up on a coffee table. I've got a glass of young Scotch in front of me and this little tape recorder that Barbara Jane Bookman gave me.

Everybody agreed that if the book was going to get written at all, I would just have to talk into this tape recorder ever chance I got and say whatever was on my mind.

I asked Jim Tom Pinch w
ho I would be talking to, and h
e said, "The world in general, your massive public, and your friendly neighborhood typist."

So that's what I'm in the midst of, World. Hello, World. How you? I only hope the final version isn't too embarrassing for anybody.

Right now, Shake is down at one of the swimming pools reading the newspapers about us, or reading a book. He does a lot of reading, which is why it was easy for him to tell me about a book publisher. In our apartment on Sixty-fifth and First Avenue in New York there are enough books to support the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge if it ever starts to sag. Shake reads just about everything he can, whether it's politics, novels or something interesting.

Barbara Jane is down at the pool with him. She's usually wherever we are and has been since about the fifth grade. We're all best friends, only better than that. Really close. Except it's a little different with Shake and Barbara Jane. They're about half in love.

So, anyhow, here I am writing my book. But don't get to feeling too sorry for me because Shake and Barb are hung up in what you call your romance, and I'm only the cruise director. I happen to be in the pleasant company right now of the lovely Miss Cissy Walford, who has been on the traveling squad for a number of weeks.

The lovely Miss Cissy Walford is starting to blush as I speak her name.

She's sprawled out comfortably across the room from me with a vodka tonic and a movie magazine. She has her legs draped over the arm of a big chair and she's wearing a pair of those expensive, crotch-tight, thigh
-
grabbing pants that must be made out of skin and she also has what obviously is a whole bunch of dandy lungs underneath a silk blouse.

I guess I don't really need to point out that Miss Cissy Walford is some kind of good-looking, or she wouldn't be with old Billy Clyde. She's right up there in the majors with Barbara Jane Bookman on looks and Barbara Jane, of course, is so damned pretty it makes your eyes blur.

The only thing wrong with Cissy Walford is that she's about half-Eastern. She's got one of those lispy, semi-stutter, fake-British accents that can really piss you off.

She's from out on Long Island somewhere with a mamma and daddy who think Princeton still plays good football. They say things like they'd like to "go get a lob for dinner," meaning a goddamned lobster, and her fuckin' daddy wouldn't pick up a thirty-dollar lunch tab if he owned Wall Street, which he does.