Semi-Tough (22 page)

The place we always go to is on Kauai, and it is hidden away from everything but semi-paradise. It doesn't have a telephone or a television or a newspaper or any ass holes around. All it has is an ocean, a beach, a mountain, a valley, some lagoons, some waterfalls and no police that I've ever seen.

Anyhow, this is where you'll be hearing from old Billy Clyde next.

The game will be some kind of history by then. I will have read about it in the papers and in
Sports Illustrated
and seen some pictures of it on television before I leave.

I will also have thought about it and replayed it a few thousand times. With myself and with Shake Tiller. I will probably have heard about it from Barbara Jane and Cissy, too, and since they are sitting in the Coliseum today with Big Ed and Big Barb and Elroy and Burt Danby, I'm sure I'll learn what those great critics thought about it.

Anyhow, I will be over there in semi-paradise with my little old tape recorder and my little old wool
—
and my two good friends for a lifetime
—
when I get around to telling you my side of what happened in the Super Bowl.

So has everybody got that straight? You too, Jim Tom?

Good.

Now I got to get after it. Anybody who wants to wish me luck can feel perfectly free to do so, and anybody who don't want to wish me luck can jump up an armadillo's ass.

This is Billy Clyde Puckett, number twenty-three, the captain of the New York Giants, the humminist sum
-
bitch that ever carried a football, going off to do a day's work.

And what I'd like to say to the world right now is fuck those lousy, shit-heel, piss-turd, nigger-wop, rat-cunt, baby-sucking, jew-Aggie, spick-cock, dog-ass Jets.

Fuck 'em, goddamn it. I mean
fuck
'em.

Just, uh, edit that any way you see fit, Jim Tom.

When I think of all the men you must have killed

With those looks that you go lookin' at 'em with,

When I think of all the good homes that you've broke

With those promises you've whispered and you've spoke,

I wonder why the Lord has gone and willed

That a Hard-hittin' Woman ain't no myth.

When I think of all the victims that you've known,

And I think of all that whisky, love and mirth,

All I hear is lonely beggin' and some cry in'

For the wives they left behind 'em with their lyin'

And I wonder why the Lord has gone and sown

A Hard-hittin' Woman on this earth.

Hard-hittin' Woman, let me be.

Hard-hittin' Woman, it's just me.

Take your body from my kind,

Take your sweet words from our wine.

Hit it hard, Hard-hittin' Woman,

Get on gone.

Get on gone, Hard-hittin' Woman,

From my mind.

Now you've gone and wrecked another life; guess who?

I'm drunk, divorced, been fired, and headed down.

But 1 can't forget those pleasures I went stealin'

From an evil thing that looked and loved with feelin'

And I wonder if the Lord would make a few
—

A few more Hard-hittin' Women for this town.

Oh yeah, a few more Hard-hittin' Women for this town.

That was a duet just then. All that nice harmony.

That was Barbi Doll Bookman and B. C. Puckett, with accompaniment by Barbi Doll Bookman on her guitar, singing "Hard-hittin' Woman," which is still in your top sixty on the country music parade.

This program is being brought to you from the semi
-
deserted beach of Lihililo in beautiful downtown Hanalei Bay, which is world-famous for the number of times that Ching Yung's trading post, bank, filling station and grocery store runs out of ice cream.

Excuse us a minute while we try another chorus. We're getting about half-good at it.

I didn't quite get back in sixty seconds, did I?

Well, time doesn't mean much out here in the islands when you don't have a whole lot to do. We've been here for almost three weeks now, and on a number of occasions I've thought about getting back to the book. But somehow I managed to get diverted by a waterfall or a lagoon or some kind of urge to snorkel.

Out here in semi-paradise we don't worry a great deal about wars or strikes or writing books.

It hasn't been my usual end-of-the-season vacation by a long shot, and there are a couple of very good reasons. One reason is Shake Tiller. And the other reason is Cissy Walford.

They never did show up, is what happened.

Barbara Jane and I got here on a Thursday, four days after the Super Bowl, just as planned. And it was the following day, Friday, when I got this message from the mainland at Ching Yung's store. I got a message there to call the lovely Miss Cissy Walford in Manhasset, Long Island, which is where her parents live.

I called her. And to make a long story short, since it pisses me off to think about it, Cissy Walford said she wasn't going to come out here because she had a wonderful opportunity to go to Italy with Boke Kellum and have a small part in a movie he was going to make over there.

She said she really would like to be in the movies, as I should have known, and that this could be her big break.

I reminded her that Boke Kellum was a limp wrist. But she said she knew that, of course, and it didn't matter because he was so nice and attentive and gentle and he knew so many big movie stars.

Besides, she said, she never had been to Italy.

I told Cissy she was making me a little bit hot.

She said she really was sorry and that she really had enjoyed my company for the past couple of months but that Boke Kellum had pointed out something to her that she should have realized.

She said he had pointed out to her that she didn't have much of a future hanging around with me because I was only a football player. And on top of that, he told her, it was noticeable to everybody that I was never going to like any girl as much as I liked Barbara Jane Bookman.

I told Cissy to go fuck a lot of wops.

The case of our good buddy Shake Tiller is considerably more interesting.

We didn't think anything about it when Shake wasn't here in semi-paradise on the day we arrived. We figured he'd got drunk or stoned or had run into some bonus wool, and would turn up a day or two late.

But he didn't.

So we finally decided to start calling around, which, I might add, cost me a substantial amount of whip-out on Ching Yung's telephone.

Nobody ever answered at our New York apartment. None of the other Giants, who had scattered all over the country to their homes and mistresses, had heard from him.

Burt Danby said he had seen him once in Clarke's since he got back from the game and that he seemed fine. Burt said Shake was sitting in Clarke's with the owner, Danny, and a few other familiar faces, like a couple of Greek girls and some novelists.

We tried to track down Elroy Blunt but Elroy's agent didn't know where Elroy was and the only number he had for him, currently, was five four two, eight six three one.

We called Linda the Stew and managed to disturb her in the middle of what I suppose was a pretty good audible.

Linda said she hadn't seen Shake Tiller or heard from him, darn the luck. She said Elroy had been there for a while but she had worn him so clean out that he said he had to go to Crockett Springs, to his Grandma's near Nashville, for a rest before his next concert tour.

Linda sort of cackled in laughter and said Elroy told her the title of a new song he was thinking up was "Pussy
-
Whipped Traveler."

She said she had a top scorer in the NBA there with her right then and we ought to see the hard-on she was looking at.

Barb and I were just about to become concerned enough about Shake to go back to New York and see if our buddy had been stabbed by a spook hooker or kidnapped by the Mastrioni brothers when we got this wire in care of Ching Yung's.

The wire was from Djakarta (I'll trust you to spell that right, Jim Tom) and it said:

Pals. Secret Agent Eighty-eight on tail of evil spies who are attempting to bring physical harm to numbers of heads of state. Not all of them are spades. Clues indicate they are en route to Sumatra but other clues indicate they are traveling toward Morocco. Those places are not close unless somebody has moved them. Am in hot pursuit and might be gone either twenty-four hours or twenty-four years. It depends on how long my masters thesis takes. Eighty-eight loves his pals but he hears of mysterious things in ocean bottoms and on mountain tops and he yearns to know what everybody loses and finds there. The future of mankind lies West but maybe it lies East. Eighty-eight trusts Billy C. to find a loaf of bread for Bookman heiress. There is something on the wind and it smells like grass. Why don't we all meet one day at the varsity picnic? Love. Eighty-eight.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about Shake's wire. I know there isn't any great trouble that he's got into which me and Barb wouldn't know about. And I'm fairly certain he'll turn up pretty soon, probably right here on Lihililo Beach when I'm involved in telling about the Super Bowl, which neither one of us particularly starred in.

Barbara Jane, however, says there's more in the wire than I care to admit.

In fact, she even went so far yesterday as to say, "I'm afraid we've lost him for a long, long while."

Around me, Barb doesn't act like Shake's absence has torn her up but she keeps that wire laying on the dresser in her bedroom of the little house we've got rented. And she has shown a tendency to do very little but sit around on the lava rocks over here and look off at the ocean as if Shake Tiller might come swimming up from Japan.

That's what she's doing while I'm laying here on the sand with my tape recorder and my six-pack of Primo that I've got iced down.

We've talked about it a lot, of course.

I keep saying our old Buddy is full of nonsense and he'll turn up almost any hour, as stoned as a giraffe, most likely, and eager to delight us with tales of banditry and intrigue. But Barbara Jane says different. She was over here a while ago, digging herself a shallow foxhole in the sand and drinking a beer.

She said she didn't claim to know Shake better than I do but she thought she knew him in a slightly different way. She had an idea that he always talked to her more seriously than he did to me.

"Things never were as uncomplicated for him as they were for us," she said. "It's true, whether you realize that or not."

She pawed at the sand.

"He thinks deeply about things, you know. He really does. He likes to act like he doesn't but he does," she said.

I made a lazy, sighing noise which came out something like, "Ohhhh, eeeee, ahhhh, gawba."

I looked out at a point on Hanalei Bay where the ocean disappears behind a high cliff. A golf course is up on top of that cliff. I idly wondered if a tidal wave would ever come that would be big enough to wash out some low scores.

"Religion," said Barb. "He's always tried to make sense out of religion."

Barb slid into her hole in the sand and propped her head up on a couple of folded towels. She spread her legs out and up, onto the beach. And she talked to the sky.

"Did he ever go into any detail about the time he was dragged to that fundamentalist church by his grandmother? When he was six or seven? And what he felt?" she said.

"He laughed," I said. "That would make any sane person laugh."

Barb said, "Sure he laughed. He had to laugh at some idiot screaming and threatening people who had to sit in hard-back chairs in a place with lousy air conditioning."

"God's partial to noise and sweat," I said. "That's what Shake decided. I guess he was right or we wouldn't have so many Baptists."

"He used to say that God sure must have had a grudge against Texas to put so many Baptists down there. Remember those lines?" Barb said.

I said, "It filled him with a real fondness for Baylor."

Neither of us said anything for a minute. I pushed an empty bottle of Primo into the sand and covered it over.

"Couldn't put the Catholics together, either," Barb said.

"What'd he say? The Catholics were Baptists in drag? Something like that. Or the Catholics were Baptists with their game uniforms on, calling audibles? I don't know," she said. "Something heartfelt and sentimental as always."

I smiled to myself.

Barb said, "How could God, he'd say, turn loose a thing like the Catholics or Baptists, who could give so many people so much torment and guilt and so many stupid rules to live by that didn't have anything to do with love?"

"Still a good question." I yawned. "Is God love or is
God Notre Dame? Help us out, Old Skipper."

Barb said, "I'm telling you it bothers Shake Tiller, luv. He's still hung up. He truly is."

She was still talking to the sky.

"He has it worked out," I said. "The Old Skipper is personal. He believes that. If a whole bunch of fools want to use the church for social or business reasons, and if they need all that guilt to cleanse themselves for lying and stealing and fucking somebody else's wife, that's their own deal. He has his."

Barb said, "But don't you see? He wonders how a real God could let it come to that. Shake Tiller believes the world is shit and don't forget it. That's what he thinks. The world is shit and it doesn't work and his cynicism helps him cope with it."

She rolled her head over toward me.

"He doesn't
like
feeling that way and he never has," she said.

I thought about it for a minute and said, "Well, he's not going to find the answer to anything over in Su
-
fuckin'-matra. That's all I know."

"Home is where the head is, luv," she said. "If I may quote Shake Tiller on you."

I sat forward and took a swig of beer.

"Look, I know we're not the same person, me and him. I know he likes things I don't like, and I know he's a lot more restless," I said. "But how can he go off somewhere without you? I couldn't do that."

Barb didn't reply.

"I don't give a damn how much he thinks he knows
about books and paintings and all that," I said. "I don't care how worldly he is, or how tortured he is, deep down, as they say. Love to me is you. And he's gone off somewhere and that's owl shit."

"Paintings and books," said Barb, curling up on her side in her foxhole, facing me. And smiling. "Dangerous things, right?"

I lit a cigarette and said, "Books are words that somebody wrote about something that nobody usually cares what they think. Except for my book, of course."

"And paintings?" Barb said.

"Big fake," I said.

She grinned.

"Painting is what people do when they don't know how to play gin or bridge. It all started with some Italians and Frenchmen and Dutchmen. They painted a lot of shit on some ceilings and walls, mostly of women with babies," I said.

"Little Jesus babies," she said.

"Yeah," I said. "And then they started painting farmhouses and bowls of flowers and ballet dancers on pieces of cloth and paper. And one day a bunch of dumb-ass millionaires said good God-a-mighty this is really great. So they bought them all up."

"I guess that takes care of painting," Barb said. "Now, sir, would you sum up sculpture for me."

I laughed.

"No such thing," I said. "Sculpture is interior decorating by another name. It's what a fag does who can't hold down a steady job. Anybody can be a sculptor. All you
have to do is go out and find some driftwood. When you get the driftwood, you take it and stick it down in some wet cement. Preferably a big, round block of wet cement. When it dries out, you go tell a rich widow about it. She has it moved over to the Guggenheim Museum and you're a sculptor."

Barbara Jane said, "I love
you
. Hand me a beer."

We sat for a long while and just looked out at the ocean and the cliff, where the tidal wave would drown the golfers.

Barb finally said, "Did he ever tell you that he thought you and I would make a better twosome, lovewise, than he and I?"

"Get out of here," I said.

"He used to talk about it with me sometimes," she said. "He said you and I would make a perfect item. He said you would adore me, and that's what a woman really wanted. He said he personally would never have the capacity to adore anything." r

"Wonderful," I said.

"You don't adore me?" Barb said.

I said, "You're aces high with me, Duke."

"It's probably a pretty good deal to be adored," she said. "What have you heard about it? Do you get meals and everything with it?"

I smiled at her.

"I wonder if we could possibly make love to each other,
physically
, after all these years?" she said. "It's interesting."

"Not very," I said.

"Too many laughs, right?" she said.

"Something like that," I said.

She crawled out of her foxhole and folded her legs and reached for the pack of cigarettes and my Dunhill.

"What if we wore disguises?" she said. "You could put on a business suit and a tie and carry a briefcase. I could put on a wig and pick you up in a bar. I'd ask you for fifty or a hundred, and you could try to ferret out my heart of gold. Get me to give up the mercenary life."

I nodded a yeah, swell.

"Better still," Barb said, "when we get back to New York I'll call you up to come over and fix my refrigerator. You can dress up like a repairman and I'll be a horny old Stove with a martini in my hand when I answer the door."

Fine, I said.

"Hey, I know," she said. "We could pretend we were making a stag movie. Get a motel room and keep the lights on'bright. I could wear long black stockings and a garter belt
—
and a sailor hat. You could roll down your socks and put on a mask and a baseball cap."

"We'd need another girl to come out of the closet, halfway through the script," I said. "Or maybe a St. Bernard."

"It just might have a chance," she said. "It wouldn't be easy, but then nobody ever said love was easy, did they?"

"It's not really a problem," I said. "When we get back to New York, Shake Tiller will be there."

Barb said, "Shake who? Who's that? Oh, you mean the
football player? He's a pain in the ass."

And Barb got up and wandered off to sit on the lava rocks and stare out at Japan.

One thing I know for sure is that nothing happened in the old Super Bowl to make Shake Tiller haul off and disappear. Although I'll say the way the game got under way made a number of us want to go dig a hole in the dirt and become a radish.

I guess it's time for me to settle down and talk about the big extravaganza, even though it is semi-painful in parts.

I still can't believe how nervous we were and how overeager we were at the start. Whatever the record was for tight ass holes, the Giants broke it.

Shake tried to make some jokes just before we came out of the dressing room for the opening kickoff but nobody laughed too hard.

"Remember this, gang," he said. "No matter what happens out there today, at least six hundred million Chinese don't give a shit."

The dog-ass Jets won the coin flip and got to kickoff, which is what we wanted to do. In a big game you'd rather kick than receive. That's to get in some licks on defense and let the other side know you've come to stack asses.

Everybody who was there or watching on television knows how fired up the Giants were just before the kickoff. That wasn't any act, the way we were jumping up and down and beating on each other.

The guys on our sideline said later that everybody on our bench was hollering, "Come get your dinners" at the dog-ass Jets and pointing down at their crotches. And those standing next to
T.J.
Lambert said that he was bent over and farting at the dog-ass Jets in tones they'd never come close to hearing before.

They said he timed his best one so that it exploded just as the Jets' kickoff man put his foot into the ball. They said
T.J.
cut one that was so loud and prolonged that a couple of dog-ass Jets going down on the kick turned their heads toward our bench in astonishment.

The last thing I said to our kick return unit as we huddled out there on the field was, "All right now. This is what we've been waitin' for. Let's get a cunt on a cunt."

Randy Juan Llanez and me are always the two deep backs on kick returns. I want to mention that in case you might have read some foolishness in
Sports Illustrated
about Shoat Cooper making a grievous mistake by using me on the opening kickoff.

I've only been returning kickoffs my whole life. Hell, I broke three all the way during the regular season. Against the Eagles and the Cowboys and the Cardinals.

It was unfortunate that the kick was a sorry one and scooted along on the ground, bouncing sort of goofy. Because Randy Juan Llanez never actually got hold of it before he was dough-popped by two or three green shirts on our ten-yard line.

I remember thinking instinctively, "Uh-oh, Jesus shit a nail." And I knew damn well I would get hit as soon as I retrieved the ball on our goal line.

Well, as you might know if you saw it, that lick Dreamer Tatum put on me from my blind side didn't feel so great. It's true, as
Sports Illustrated
wrote, that "the jolting blow momentarily separated Puckett from all that made intellectual sense
—
as well as the football."

Dreamer rang my hat when he busted me, all right, and then went on to recover the ball for a dog-ass touchdown on the very first play of the game. But I can't help laughing now at what he said to me after he came over and helped me up and patted me on the ass.