"I always hire a limousine in New York," said Big Barb. "It's the only way you can shop and get anything done."
Big Ed asked what chance the show had to be funny.
None, I said, based on one of the scripts I had tried to read. But that didn't mean the show might not be a success. With few exceptions, sitcom humor catered to the intellect of a rooster.
I had saved the script I'd tried to read, thinking it would be invaluable evidence if Barbara Jane were ever called into a courtroom to explain why she had murdered Sheldon Gurtz and Kitty Feldman, the executive producers and lead writers of the show.
The first two pages alone would have ensured my wife's acquittal. A verbatim reproduction follows:
RITA'S LIMO STOP
COLD OPENING
FADE IN:
INT. CHIC RESTAURANT—NIGHT
(EAST SIDE MANHATTAN. PAN TO KITCHEN. RITA, A BEAUTIFUL GIRL, RUSHES OVER TO KO, A CHINESE CHEF.)
RITA
I'm starved!
(SHE GRABS A BITE OF FOOD OFF A PLATE.)
KO
No, you Rita! Velly good owner!
RITA
Thank you, Ko. I'm glad you agree. Now stop putting bean sprouts in the onion soup!
(RITA LEAVES KITCHEN, ENTERS RESTAURANT PROPER, BUMPS INTO AMANDA, HER PARTNER. THE RESTAURANT IS CROWDED, THE OWNERS FRANTIC.)
AMANDA
We've run out of lamb!
RITA
I wish we'd run out of bean sprouts.
AMANDA
This is serious, Rita. What are we going to serve?
RITA
Chili dogs.
AMANDA
Again? We're supposed to be a Continental restaurant!
RITA
Our chili dogs are made with the best French mustard! If we can serve bean sprouts in the onion soup, we can serve chili dogs.
AMANDA
How did we get into this? We're getting our brains beat out.
RITA
I've got that part down. It's all those days off I can't get used to.
(AN ANGRY WOMAN INTERRUPTS THEM.)
ANGRY WOMAN
I wouldn't send a pornographic mugger to this restaurant! The food stinks and the service is rude!
RITA
I'm sorry but I've forgotten your name.
AMANDA
Trouble.
(RITA TURNS TO AMANDA.)
RITA
That was your husband's name, wasn't it?
ANGRY WOMAN
You won't see me in here again!
RITA
What have you got against grease?
ANGRY WOMAN EXITS. RITA SUDDENLY LEANS AGAINST A DOOR FACING, CLOSES HER EYES, PRESSES ON HER TEMPLES.)
AMANDA
Rita, what's wrong?
RITA
Nothing.
AMANDA
Yes, there is!
RITA
I'll be fine, Amanda, as soon as the bean sprouts go away.
AMANDA
Is it another one of those headaches?
RITA
Really, it's nothing a million dollars can't cure.
AMANDA
You must see a doctor.
RITA
He'd only find something wrong with an entree.
AMANDA
Do you ever wish we were still married— away from all this?
RITA
It's the car pools I miss the most.
(A CUSTOMER RISES FROM A TABLE JUST IN TIME TO HIT A TRAY BEING CARRIED BY A WAITER. WE HEAR A CRASH.)
AMANDA
Oh, no!
RITA
I wish they'd stop overtipping.
(NOW WE HEAR A KITCHEN CRASH.)
AMANDA
Oh, my God!
RITA
It's all right. That could be the last of the bean sprouts!
(AMANDA CONTINUES STARING AT RITA WITH A WORRIED LOOK.)
DISSOLVE TO:
"Can Barbara Jane act?" Big Ed was now asking.
"I don't think it matters, but I'll find out when I get to L.A.," I said.
"When's it gonna be on TV?"
As I understood it, there was something in television called a "mid-season replacement" and something else called "a second season." The show had a chance to go on the air in late October or late January. In October, the networks looked at the ratings to see which car wrecks people were watching and which car wrecks they weren't watching. They did the same thing in January. The car wrecks nobody watched got canceled and were generally replaced with better car wrecks.
Big Ed said, "I never see car wrecks. All I see is faggots in living rooms."
"Those are the hits. They never change."
"What network is it?"
"ABC."
"Which one's ABC?"
"The one without Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw," I said in an effort to be helpful.
Big Ed and Big Barb still seemed confused.
"Helicopter crashes and car wrecks?"
Still no clue.
"Olympics?" I said.
"Faggots," Big Ed scowled.
"Fags in the Olympics?" I couldn't avoid a look of astonishment.
"Hell, look how they dress when they compete in those silly events," he said. "Everything they wear crawls up their ass."
"ABC is the network with Howard Cosell," I said, taking a final stab at it.
"Oh, shit," said Big Ed, guzzling his vodka.
The plight of TCU's football program came up for discussion. Big Ed was an influential TCU alum, a major contributor to the athletic fund. Through the years, he had provided new lights for the stadium, artificial turf, a modernized weight room, four or five quarterbacks who excelled at throwing incompletions, a dozen or more ball-carriers who ran backwards, a bevy of linemen who never learned to block, and a vast amount of purple paint for the coaches' offices.
All Big Ed wanted for his untiring generosity was one more Southwest Conference championship. TCU had won championships regularly when he was a kid, but he hadn't enjoyed one since Shake and I had led the Horned Frogs to an 8-3 record in the early Seventies.
T. J. Lambert was the right man at the right time, Big Ed was convinced. He was the coach who could get the job done if the Frogs could only recruit a little more aggressively.
"I don't want any NCAA probations,, but I can live with a few reprimands."
He was aware of Tonsillitis Johnson.
"Tonsillitis can do it all. He can take us to the Cotton Bowl straight as a Indian goes to shit."
"That's quick," I said.
Big Ed reached for another Sherman cigarettello. "T. J.'s worried we can't outbid Texas or Oklahoma for Tonsillitis. They'll give him a car, an apartment, a summer job that'll make him richer than two orthodontists. I said, Hell, I know how we can get that nigger. We'll give him his own 7-Eleven, tell him he can rob it any time he wants to!"
Big Barb shushed Big Ed with a look and a gentle tug on the sleeve of his coat.
I had never been able to shush Big Ed. Neither had Barbara Jane or Shake. Big Ed had been saying nigger for as long as we could remember.
We all said it as kids without realizing the hurt it caused. But if you have any feelings, you change when you get older and life drops some smart on you. You can even get pissed off when you hear it applied to a teammate who blocks his ass off for you and accepts you as his equal.
I don't know if Shake and me had become totally colorblind through sports, which is the best thing about sports. I hope so. We still said nigger in a joking way around black guys who acted like they understood there wasn't any hate in our hearts. Anyhow, the word wasn't going to disappear, no matter how loud your Eastern liberals hollered at your truck-stop Southerners.
I'd stopped worrying about the way people talked a long time ago. It was what a person was that mattered. And the truest thing of all was that I didn't have a black friend who wouldn't understand that you can't shush anybody worth $60 million.
At River Crest, all I did was seiz
e the moment to excuse myself from Big Ed and Big Barb's company, telling the lie that my knee was starting to act up. What I really intended to do was go back to my hotel and get drunk alone.
It had become a pre-game ritual. After all, I had to help that other great liberal, T. J. Lambert, beat the Rice Owls the next day.
FIVE
Blue and gray crepe paper—Rice University's colors — cluttered the ceiling, crawled up the walls, and wrapped around benches in the TCU locker room. Over in a corner, a stereo blasted away with a scratchy recording of "Put On Your Old Gray Bonnet," the Rice fight song.
"It's inspired," I remarked to T.J. as we stood near a coffee urn, watching the gallant Horned Frogs lazily suiting up for the game.
"We've had it lookin' like this all week," T. J. said. "The equipment people done it. I've had 'em playin' that song all week, too. I figured it was a way to get our crowd sick to death of them Chinese cocksuckers."
"Chinese?"
"Yeah, fuck them rice-eatin' turds."
T. J. wheeled on his squad.
"Fuck Rice! Fuck ever grain in Uncle Ben's fuckin' box! Piss on China!"
T.J. was getting his game-face on. Two players responded with zeal.
"Rice eats shit!" somebody hollered.
"They eat owlshit!" came another cry.
I stirred the coffee in a paper cup. "Uh...T.J., what's China got to do with anything?"
"Chinks eat rice, don't they?"
I looked at the floor.
"Well?" he said.
"Well, what?"
"Well, I ain't gonna lose no football game to a fuckin' bunch of Chinks!"I said, "T.J., they haven't moved Rice from Houston to Peking while my back was turned, have they?"
"Fuck Houston!" T.J. reminded the room.
I shook my head. "Coach, I guess I don't understand. Has Rice got a Chinese quarterback or something?"
"Naw, they got a nigger. Why?"
"No reason," I said. "I was just trying to pick up the thread of the plot."
T. J. bellowed at the Horned Frogs again.
"Who eats shit?"
"Chinamen!"
"What with?"
"Rice!" It was a group reply.
I refilled the coffee cup. "T.J., you do know where the name comes from, don't you? An old rich guy named William Marsh Rice founded the school. He was a person, like a Duke or a Vanderbilt or a Stanford."
"Them's schools," said T. J. He bit off a chunk of chewing tobacco.
"First, they were people," I said. "Leland Stanford was a robber baron. William Marsh Rice was a cotton-farmer robber baron."
"Billy Clyde," T. J. said to me with a sympathetic expression, "what the fuck's wrong with you? John Brodie and Jim Plunkett and them studs didn't play football for no sissy named Leland."
"You're right," I said.
He said, "Let me explain something to you. Rice pricks is engineers, ain't they? Scientists? Computer technology and all that shit? Well, who knows more about computers than anybody? Chinamen, that's who."
"It's the Japanese, isn't it?"
"Japs, Chinamen. God damn, Billy Clyde, gimme a fuckin' break!"
"I'm beginning to understand."
"Awright, then," T.J. said. "Fuck Rice!"
Out on the field during warmups, I met three of T.J.'s assistant coaches. Like the head coach himself, they were all dressed in purple knit shirts, khaki trousers, and purple baseball caps. They all had a mouthful of gum or tobacco.
It was a warm September afternoon. Being down on the field was a good feeling, a fanciful experience. I was looking around at the crowd that filled only half of the 46,000 seats in TCU's stadium when Mike Homer came up to me. He was the Frogs' offensive coordinator.
I asked Mike if TCU was ready to play a good game.
"You can't ever tell," he said, his eyes fixed on a cute TCU cheerleader who wore a white tank top and a short pleated purple skirt. She had frizzy blond hair and tanned, curvy legs. "Lots of high-class beaver up in New York, huh?"
"Yeah," I admitted, largely to please him. "We got a thrower?"
"Guess you get it lobbed at you from all directions."
"Pretty much. How good's our passer?"
"That there's old Sandi," he said.
Now I was staring at the cheerleader.
Mike Homer said, "Lord, I know she's somebody's daughter, but I'd wet her down."
The assistant coach then raced onto the field to slap a player on the side of his purple helmet for not throwing the ball with enough steam on it.
A few minutes later, I was shaking hands with Red Jeffers, the defensive coordinator.
"We ready?" I asked him.
"God damn, there's old Sandi," he said, feeling around on his crotch.
Sandi was in a huddle with the other TCU cheerleaders. While I wasn't all that fond of midgets, I said:
"Old Sandi's all right."
"You ain't shittin'," Red Jeffers said. "'Course, I reckon she ain't nothin' to compare with New York whup."
"New York whup?"
"They got it up there, don't they?"
"Pretty much."
"Damn." he said, clawing at his balls again. "All them Wops and Jews with big titties. I'm gonna get my ass up there one of these days."
Red Jeffers then raced onto the field to slap a player on the side of his purple helmet for not digging out hard enough on a sprint.
The last assistant coach I met was Ronnie Bob Collins. He was in charge of the defensive secondary.
"Looks like we have some speed in the secondary," I said to Coach Collins. "Will they hit?"
"Not like that little shit over there," he said, looking at Sandi. "How'd you like to get hooked up with her? Tell you one thing. You wouldn't need no kick-starter on your tongue!"
The teams returned to their dressing rooms for last-minute instructions and nervous pisses before the opening kickoff. That was when T. J. formally introduced me to his valiants.
The introduction was moving enough. I was an All-American, an all-pro, a man who had once sneaked out of a hospital where I was recovering from three broken ribs to beat Notre Dame almost single-handedly on a Saturday very much like this one.
T. J. put his hand on my shoulders as he faced the Horned Frogs. "If Billy Clyde Puckett was eligible and I needed him today, he'd drag his butt out there—cast and all—and find some way to win!"
I didn't know what in the name of the Gipper I would say to the TCU players until I sat on the edge of a table and looked out at their farm-kid faces, their street-smart glances, at the white numerals on their purple jerseys.
Like most major college teams, and most NFL teams, T.J.'s current batch of Horned Frogs were predominantly white with certain positions reserved for black athletes.
T. J. went along with the thinking that had clouded the minds of other head coaches throughout the history of integrated football. A quarterback should be white, even if he was a lanky senior like Sonny Plummer, who knelt on the floor in front of me and whose arm reminded T. J. of a seal. A ball-carrier ought to be black, even if he was Webster Davis, a tailback T.J. hoped to replace next year with Tonsillitis Johnson, Davis being a runner T. J. described as having no right to be black because he was "too fuckin' slow." Elsewhere, tight ends were white, wide receivers were black; centers were white; offensive and defensive linemen were both—size was all that mattered; linebackers were white, cornerbacks were black. Safeties could be either shade if they were good outfielders.
There was more country-boy prejudice than scientific logic behind this thinking—the Hall of Fame is littered with exceptions. But nearly every coach is an ex-player who remembers the time some black athlete screwed up in a critical game situation. White players screw up, too, but a coach rationalized this by saying the white players are only trying too hard to win, whereas black players screw up because they aren't trying hard enough, seeing as how they're black, of course. A coach detests careless mistakes.
Coaches don't care if you understand their l
ogic in the matter, and they don't give a shit whether you condemn it or not. All coaches are cautious and conservative by nature, mainly because their jobs often hang on the bounce of a fumble—and most of them spend their careers getting fired for not winning.
A coach creates his own mistakes at times, and he'll frequently do it by assigning his black athletes to the "hot- dog" positions that he insists are best suited to the mind and body of the black athlete, positions in which the blacks themselves are the most "comfortable." These are the positions that require speed, skill, and strength, ideally all three, but don't necessarily require brainwork.
Coaches remind themselves and each other that a quarterback has to call plays or audibilize, a center has to pick up the blitz, a linebacker has to "read" before he reacts, and a tight end has to like the dirty work of blocking more than he likes to catch passes—and you want a coach to trust a black guy to do those things?
A coach in the 1980s had yet to be fooled by any of history's exceptions to his rules. Coaches had yielded to the changes in society but somewhat on their own terms. Coaches still hadn't seen a great black center—that must prove something.
But with the emergence of the black athlete had come another problem. Kids today, white or black, wanted to be told "why" before they jumped in the slop in the name of duty, honor, the old school colors—and that "why" was just too God-damn-much fucking trouble for most coaches to explain to a kid who was getting a free four-year education and all the pussy he could handle.