"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.
Old Dreamer said, "Stick that in your fucking book."
Throughout the whole first quarter, even the first half, I guess it would be fair to say that we were in some kind o
f a daze.
For a long time I didn't think Hose Manning would be able to draw back and hit the ground with the football if you held the turf up in front of his face-guard.
Shake got as open as Linda the Stew's wool three or four times but Hose only threw the ball about twenty feet over his head, as if Hose was afraid an interception would give him syphilis.
After Hose had missed on his first eight passes, Shake trotted back to the huddle and said, "It's sure nice out there today, Hose. Can I order you anything from room service?"
Old Hose ignored him. He just spit and said, "Let's go, bunch. Lets strike a match now. Here we go."
Hose wasn't getting very good protection, I've got to say.
Our line was trying to zone-block or scramble-block or some idiot thing that wasn't working. On situations where I had to stay back and protect, it looked like a junior high school recess coming at me.
"Sumbitch," said Hose once, trying to get up after the whistle. "I thought you could only have eleven fuckers on a side."
What got us was, they were playing us normal, just like Shake and me felt they would. Dreamer played the wide part of the field, like any rover, even when Shake would split out toward the near sideline.
Obviously they were guessing that a good pass rush on Hose was the best defense against Shake Tiller.
Their defense jumped around a lot, trying to confuse us, when Hose would be up at the line calling signals. Dreamer would move up on the line of scrimmage, like he might be intending to come on a blitz, but he would back off.
It caused a couple of bad snaps and one or two delay penalties when Hose would try to call an audible. Once Hose called an audible for Booger Sanders to follow me through right guard, but Booger couldn't hear the play.
It was actually kind of funny.
Hose started his cadence at the line and then changed his play.
When he was calling out the new play, Booger hollered, "Check," meaning he couldn't hear the play.
Hose called out the signals again, and Booger shouted, "Check," again.
So old Hose raised up from behind the center and turned around to Booger Sanders and pointed at Puddin Patterson's butt and said, "Right fuckin' through here, you country cocksucker."
The dog-ass Jets broke up laughing, and so did the rest of us, and we got a five-yard penalty for delay of the game.
For a while, it was a little bit unsettling to have Dreamer Tatum talking to us on the line of scrimmage.
Dreamer would say things like, "Hey, Billy Puckett, run at me, baby."
Or he would say to Hose Manning, "Watch it now, Mr. Quarterback. Dream Street comin' this time. Dream Street comin'."
You have to be a stud athlete that everybody expects miracles from to know what it's like to get as humiliated as we were in the early part of the game.
Especially in something like a Super Bowl before ninety-two thousand people and about a hundred million on television.
I'll grant you that we looked rotten, all of us, but I want to point out that it just isn't true what all of the newspapers and Sports Illustrated said about Shake Tiller — that he might have been suffering a slight case of over-confidence.
Some people have reasoned that this is why Shake dropped a couple of balls that Hose finally threw in his vicinity. And the reason why he fumbled the one ball he did catch in the first quarter. Which resulted in another touchdown for the dog-ass Jets.
The truth is, Shake dropped one ball because he was so wide open he was overeager to put some white stripes behind him. He knew there wasn't anything but six points in front of him if he could spin around and get going.
He just started too soon.
Shake unfastened his chin strap and walked slowly back to the huddle after the play. He winked at me and then looked at Hose and said, "Shit, it's no fun if you're gonna hit me in the hands."
Hose said, "Let's go, bunch. Let's pop the cork now and start pourin'."
I can testify also that Shake dropped the other ball because Hose threw it about five feet over his head and my buddy had to leap up, twist around, stretch out and grunt, and even then he only got one hand on it just as two dog-ass Jets high-lowed him.
But I guess the great sports writers think that if you're Shake Tiller you're supposed to be able to catch every flea that ever ran up a dog's ass.
When Shake fumbled that ball he caught in the first quarter, for what would have been our initial first down of the game, it was frankly because Dreamer Tatum knocked his eyelids off.
Shake grabbed it over his shoulder — it was a just little old quick-out — but just as he stopped to throw an inside fake, Dreamer, who was steaming up on him, caught him a lick that Barbara Jane said she could even hear.
The ball squirted straight up in the air, on our forty-five, and here came one of their dog-ass linebackers, Hoover Buford from Baylor of all places, to pick off the ball in mid-air and practically trot to the end zone.
The Baptist sumbitch could have stopped to take a leak and nobody could have caught him. I'd hit into the line and was too far away, and Hose, of course, is not exactly what you'd call your Metroliner.
Al (Abort) Goodwin would have had a chance, provided he knows how to tackle, but Al had sprinted his usual fifty yards down the sideline.
Barbara Jane says that up in the stands after we fell behind by fourteen — even though it was obviously the work of fate and not the dog-ass Jets — there were some fairly despondent souls among the Giant fans.
She said Big Ed couldn't decide who to cuss the most, Dreamer Tatum or Shoat Cooper.
She said Big Ed kept hollering: "Big toe! Big toe! Somebody kick that nigger in the big toe or he's gonna beat us by himself."
Barbara Jane said Burt Danby just kept shaking his head and saying: "We just wanted it too much, I guess. You shouldn't want something as badly as this. You really shouldn't."
Barbara Jane said Elroy Blunt apparently hadn't been to bed at all — not for any sleep, at least — and that he was so tired and hung over and wool-whipped from his party that he couldn't even get excited about the game.
She said Elroy's eyes were the color of beets and he looked like he'd shrunk about two sizes.
She said that after the dog-ass Jets had us down by twenty-one in the middle of the second quarter — which was after Boyce Cayce had hit Jessie Luker on that seventy-yard bomb because Jimmy Keith Joy slipped down — that Elroy just looked up in the sky.
She said he just looked up at God and said:
"It's me again, ain't it? I got me ten large on it but you ain't gonna let me steal nuthin', are you?"
She said Elroy turned to her with his floppy-brimmed suede hat halfway covering up his face and said quietly, "How come it's always my turn now instead of niggers?"
Well, of course, if anybody thinks it was semi-dreary up in the stands, they should have been down on the field.
Until T.J. Lambert smothered Boyce Cayce that time and got 11s a fumble on their thirty-five, we were on the brink of give-up because nothing would go right for us.
That fumble T.J. captured, which I think he got because he farted so viciously that no dog-ass Jet wanted to go near the ball, enabled us to get a field goal and at least get something on the scoreboard.
I didn't want us to take the three when we only had fourth-and-one on their two-yard line, especially when we were down by twenty-one, but Shoat Cooper wanted any points he could get.
That was Shoat's play and not Hose Manning's, so all of those Giant fans who threw all of those cushions and garbage at Hose when he came off the field ought to feel pretty apologetic about it.
I know it was Shoat's decision because Shake and me were in on the conversation when we called time out and went to the sideline to talk it over.
I wanted to try to stick in there myself, but Shoat said, "Stud hoss, if we was to line up tight, you'd get hit by ever-body in Queens."
Hose wanted to throw, but Shoat said we didn't have any passing room.
&nbs
p; "If they stop us here without no points at all," said Shoat, "it'll give them piss ants too much of an emotional boost."
This was when Shake Tiller said, "Hell, they're tellin' jokes out there now."
I still think I could have stuck it in there for six, but we did what Shoat ordered. Shake Tiller held the ball and Hose Manning kicked it through there and we got our three.
I was all set to block Dreamer when he rushed, but he didn't rush. He faked like he would, and then raised up and laughed. And before he jogged off the field, you may not have noticed how he patted Shake on top of the hat and shook Hose's hand to congratulate him. Would that piss you off at all?
Anyhow, that was the score, twenty-one to three, when we went in for the strangest halftime I've ever encountered.
I'm afraid that for about the first ten minutes we were in the dressing room we acted like a crowd of convicts who didn't like their fat meat. Just about everybody kicked something and slung his helmet against the wall or on the floor. It was T.J. Lambert of course who made the most noise.
"Tootie fruities!" he hollered. "We're all a bunch of goddamned tootie fruities."
T.J. snarled and puffed and built up to a roar and called out, "We're through takin' shit!"
There was general movement through the room, with guys going to get a Coke out of a drink box, or going to take a dump or a leak.
"Hose Manning!" T.J. yelled. "You know what your fuckin' old offense looks like out there? It looks like a barrel of hog shit!"
Hose was over opening his locker and getting out a clipboard with pages of plays in it. He sat down quietly on the bench and started looking through the plays, and smoking a cigar.
T.J. carried on.
"By God, my defense ain't give 'em nothin' but one diddywaddle pass and they don't get that if my nigger don't slip down back there," he said. "Jimmy Keith Joy, you Aferkin sumbitch, where are you?"
From across the room you could hear Jimmy Keith's voice.
"Yo, Daddy," Jimmy Keith hollered.
"Jimmy Keith, get your ass up here in front of everybody and take a fuckin' oath that there ain't no other tootie fruitie gonna get behind you the rest of the day," T.J. said.