Most everybody at the party gathered around to watch the game, but before it started, Elroy announced that it was "the first annual pre-Super Bowl drunk-stoned two-below game, bringing together the gentlemanly, suave New York Giants and the fuck-head New York Jets."
Well, we played for a while. But it wasn't much of a contest since we let the fags be the passers and the receivers while me and Shake and Dreamer and Boyce just groveled around on the ground, play-blocking and falling down a lot, and ruining our clothes, and laughing and grunting and piling on each other while the fags tried in earnest to injure the girls.
We made up some truly brilliant plays, though.
One of them was Tits Go Long.
Another one was Piss to Daylight. That was for Nancy.
I think the Jets won, if you're truly interested in the outcome.
It was mainly because Linda the Stew occupied the better part of our defense — like me and Shake and Elroy — when she ran a pass route. We sure did commit some interference.
The party, by the way, is still in progress for some, even as I'm still sitting here in the living room of our palatial suite on Super Bowl morning looking at what's now left of my various remedies for headaches and remorse.
We all came home after the Super Bowl touch game, which sort of straightened out our heads. I guess I've slept about two hours.
I hope T.J. got home. We made Nancy the Nurse promise to see that he got here after he woke up and went and pissed on her all he could in the marble bathtub. When T.J. doesn't get home until daylight, Donna Lou has a tendency to worry. Of course, that's if Donna Lou's home by then.
Boyce Cayce left the party with a fairly shopworn debutante who said she lived in the Valley and would have enough money pretty soon to go straight and open up her own beauty parlor.
Dreamer Tatum left with Linda the Stew, as you might have suspected. Linda was very excited about it. She said that if she lived to be thirty or even thirty-five, she would probably never have another night when she got to have it popped in her by a famous recording artist and a famous cornerback.
Elroy told Dreamer, "You better be an All-Pro in the rack, son, because you done got hold of yourself a po-ran-ah fish."
I hope filthy little Linda has worn Dreamer's ass full out by now. I really hope so.
And I guess with that thought in mind, this is as good a time as any to say that the hour of truth has finally arrived for Billy Clyde.
It's time for me to cut the bullshit and go get ready to do the thing I've been talking about all week, which is knock the dicks off the dog-ass Jets.
Yes, sir, it's time for old Billy Clyde to go get taped and go eat the team breakfast and ride out to the Los Angeles Coliseum on this beautiful Sunday in January and hook it up with my New York Giant pals and kick the pure zebra shit out of those rotten, low-life, low-rent, dog-ass motherfuckers.
Pardon the language but my game-face is some kind of on.
You won't be hearing from me tonight. Or even tomorrow morning. Or even for a few days, maybe even a week or two.
Win or lose in a few more hours (and I shouldn't even question it), old Billy Clyde tonight, when he's beat up and sore and whip-dog tired and mentally wrung out from the game, is gonna get himself ass-deep in so much young Scotch that this palatial suite of ours better be able to float.
Win or lose (and I don't know why I keep saying that), this is the end of the season and that means me and Shake are going off on our annual round trip to Dissipate City.
Our actual plans are as follows:
Marvin (Shake) Tiller has to fly back to New York early Monday morning to be on a couple of TV shows that night. He says he's got some other business around town that'll take him two or three more days, although I can't imagine what it is. Anyhow, Shake's going back Monday for TV, mainly, and Cissy Walford says she'll fly back with him because she needs to see her parents for a few hours to let them know she's alive and not pregnant.
I'm staying here while Shake and Cissy do all that.
I'm staying here to do nothing for two or three days but drink and sleep and maybe do me a Linda and a Sandi. Barbara Jane is staying out here, too, mainly on business but partly to keep me company, if I want any.
What will happen toward the end of the week is that all four of us are going to meet in a place where me and Shake and Barbara Jane have been going every year for about the last three years at the end of the season.
Every year the three of us — plus the young wool of my choice — wind up at this place in the Hawaiian Islands. For about two or three weeks over there we just lay in the sun and eat and sleep and drink and smoke and fuck and moan a lot.
There is nothing like it after a hard season.
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 th
en. 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."