“Is drinking really making you feel better? Because we’ve drunk every night this week and I’m beginning to feel overstuffed. Kinda like how your pants are too tight right around the time that the second NFL game starts on turkey day.”
“Because I have a dick, I’m not allowed to be sad about something?” I snap. Someone starts playing Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” the saddest dirge about how cold and broken love can leave you. Nice. I grab the last shot glass and down the contents. My throat’s so numb I can’t even feel the burn as the liquor slides down my throat. I’m going to have to switch to whiskey.
“You ain’t sad. You’re feeling sorry for yourself. You’re moping around like someone took your football away. On the field, you’re awesome, Matty, but off of it? You’re letting everything fall apart. I don’t know exactly what went down between you two but I can guess. And she might be a stone-cold bitch and you’re better off shot of her. But at some point, you gotta stand up and work for something off the field.”
He rubs a hand down his face. “I don’t know why I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
It’s the disappointment in his voice that finally penetrates my thick, dumb skull. “Football gives back what you put into it. The rest of it, like Buckley’s saying.” I wave my hand in the general direction of what I think might be the jukebox although it might also just be a bunch of boxes of empty beer bottles awash in neon. “Love just ruins you.”
“Bullshit.”
“What?”
This is Hammer. Who loves football. Whose entire wardrobe consists of Warrior T-shirts, shorts, and workout gear. He bleeds blue and gold. I knock my hand against my ear. Did he just call bullshit on the only true and reliable facts of our lives—football is it.
“We both know I’m not going pro. Most of the guys that play at Western won’t ever even get to sniff the turf at a pro stadium unless they’re paying to be there. That’s why I took this job writing articles for a woman’s magazine. You think it’s funny as hell, but this is going to get me a good paying job when I graduate.”
Hammer grabs my shoulder and forces me to look at him. “This thing with Ace? It’s not even about winning anymore. It’s whether we’re going to enjoy playing together. Matty, fuck, this is our last year. I don’t want to go out wondering what if, and regretting the time I spent. Even if we don’t win another title, I still want to know that I gave it all I had because I was playing with the best motherfuckers in the world. I don’t like saying this, but you kinda need a wakeup call. Is it possible she had a good reason for kicking your ass to the curb?
You aren’t a good risk.
She’d known it all along, and I’d laughed it off. Because on the field, I’m reliable as they come. Off of it, I duck anything close to responsibility. It’s not that I mind a challenge. Challenges are fun. But conquering a challenge isn’t the same as shoving on a pair of shitkickers and getting down in the trenches into messy, dirty, uncomfortable things.
The night we took Lucious out, I got drunk rather than stick to my own rules of no booze, no chicks.
I wasn’t thinking of Luce that night. I was thinking of myself.
I was a good lover because it reflected well on me.
I pursued Luce because it was fun—for me.
It’s always been about me. Even when she broke up with me, I didn’t see things from her point of view.
We were even in this random joint twenty miles from campus because I didn’t want to be around Luce.
I feel sick, and it’s not because of the liquor. The acid of self-disgust is mixing with all that booze, and I can feel it climbing upward.
“I need the john. Where is it?”
Hammer sizes up the situation immediately and starts pulling me through the crowd. People scatter in the wake of his two-hundred-and-eighty-pound form until my drunk ass is in the bathroom. I barf up the shots I’d been pounding since I arrived like I was participating in some cheap Spring Break contest. Guy who drinks the most shots in two minutes gets a free chaser of beer and a card with the local ambulance number on it.
I wipe my face with toilet paper. Flush three times and then dunk my head in the sink. After I wash away any residue and hopefully some of my dumbassery, I grab a handful of paper towels and run them through my hair.
“What do you want to do?”
“Me?” Hammer points to himself.
“Yeah, we’ve been doing my crap all week. What do you want?”
He ponders this. “There’s a redhead out there who’s been eyefucking me. I wouldn’t mind doing her.”
Okay. “Here or back home?”
“Here. Definitely here.”
Which is how I find myself sitting on the dingy barroom floor, directing people away from the men’s room for thirty minutes while Hammer and the redhead enjoy an energetic and sometimes noisy interlude.
* * *