74,000 words | LIt. Fiction/Sports/African-American
Synopsis: Balls-to-the-wall, story-within-a-story rip on the game of football all the way from high school to professional told from the perspective of an ex-NFL player with a head injury.
Foreword
Chapter Excerpt
One.
That's all you get. One egg, that is. Don't believe me? Go look in the mirror. How many eggs do you see staring back at you? Exactly one, I hope, or your egg is more fucked up than mine. One fucking egg. Think long and hard about that the next time you tune into a football game on your favorite sports network and get a hard-on while you watch handsome young men bust up their eggs for you. I want you to think about it because I think about it a lot. That’s because my egg is scrambled. I'm talking poached, fried, over-easy, hard-boiled, soft-boiled, coddled, huevos rancheros, pickled, smoked--Eggs Benedict for the fancier folks in the press boxes with season tickets--whatever you want to choose from the menu. It's a goddam Denver omelet in here--a clusterfuck of a goddam clusterfuck. Denver is one cold-ass place to play football in the wintertime. That mile-high hurts something fierce on Monday morning when you roll over in bed and grope around with your filthy hands for the Vicodin--Oxycontin if you're lucky--and the three hits of speed you need to wake up. I like Blue and Clears speed. That's what I call them because they’re blue on one half and they’re clear on the other half. Doctors used to give them to bored housewives, so they can't be too bad for you. You know, so the housewives would vacuum the house before their husbands got home. Speed made those housewives horny as hell. They’d suck up the dirt with their new Hoovers then do the same to their old man's junk like there was no tomorrow. Not a bad deal for the dudes--the fat-fucks. That's what we called them. The fans--the ghouls--the armchair quarterbacks--the another-excuse-to-get-drunk assholes in the stands wearing the jerseys with their faces painted up, swilling down flat stadium beer, all out to witness the egg busting spectacle. Fat-fucks. Sorry if you’re one of them. And sorry for the wandering, but I'm getting there--slowly. My egg wandering in the woods is part of my condition and that's sort of what this book is about. It's not a fairy tale. It's a goddam nightmare. The nightmare, the truth I'm talking about is how young men get tricked into busting their beautiful, fragile young eggs in order to sell Bud Light and Buicks to the fat-fucks while housewives on speed sneak back to the laundry room and masturbate to the Crate & Barrel catalog. Women were the ones who were the hope--they were supposed to say no, enough is enough. Please get your hand out of your pants and put the Crate & Barrel stuff porn catalog down ladies and lend a hand here.
Twenty-thousand hits is what the doctor told me the average NFL linebacker or lineman takes to his egg in a career. That's more cock than the best hippie chick following the Grateful Dead sucked by a factor of ten. Or, put another way, it's about the same number of women raped each year by fraternity boys at schools like the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia relishes in its traditions: Thomas Jefferson, football, Thomas Jefferson, fraternity boys wearing blue blazers and orange UVA ties and chino shorts, Thomas Jefferson, basketball, Thomas Jefferson, a second-rate state school trying to act like an Ivy league school but with no chance now because its administration continued to let fraternity boys carry on the their fathers’ tradition of raping young women, Thomas Jefferson, fraternity boys raping girls and getting away with it. I’m sure your favorite college or university has its own traditions, just like the University of Virginia, unless it’s been overrun by Asians. Asians are new to the frat rape thing, but give them time and they’ll adapt to the good-ole boy ways. Everybody who comes to America adapts to the good-ole boy ways eventually. And before you get too pissed off about the Asian stuff and call me a nasty name (which I’m sure you’ve already done and I thank your pansy, hacky-sack playing, porn-surfing, status quo loving ass for that), think about the odd culture of a university: the smart people, Asians and everybody else who works hard to get there, get an education without getting their heads banged up. That’s a beautiful, amazing thing, the way things are supposed to work. But the football players, who are more often than not considered to be not that smart, and let’s be frank, are also considered by all non-cotton patch folks (the cotton patch is what players call the football field in case you didn’t know) to be the hired help. Hired by the inebriated college president cocksucker pimps sitting in the big house on the hill to get their eggs slammed and cracked and banged and smashed and busted and turned to jello--all for you, all to make your dick hard, if you have one. Consider that the next time you sit your sorry drunk ass down in the stands of your favorite college football game, thinking about the frat party later on at Kappa Sig where the Rohypnol will flow freely, furnished of course by the pre-med students (Rohypnol is Roofies, the date rape drug, but you already knew that).
Twenty-thousand hits to my egg. You do the math. Most of us started playing football when we were six, seven, eight years old. That comes out to about 20 to 25 years of egg scrambling. A lot of that egg scrambling happens in practice, away from the television cameras and the Budweiser and Buick commercials. The ratio of practicing football to actually playing a football game on television is at least 100 to 1, probably more. So for every one hit I took on television for you and your fat-fuck friends, I took 100 hits in practice. Think about it. I think about it a lot.
The doctor had all sorts of X-rays and CAT scans and MRIs and other images and data and tests and assays he showed me to prove my egg was fucked up as a can of worms on a Mississippi riverbank in July. “Sawbones” is what I call him. “Humpty Dumpty” is what I told him to call me because that's what I call myself. I guess you figured out by now that I played a lot of football--way too much football for my egg or anybody's egg for that matter. I was a linebacker in the NFL. A football is shaped like an egg, sort of. Just thought I'd let you know. I didn't play for Denver, in case you were wondering. Here's a little rhyme I keep on my desk:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the college presidents and medical school deans and all the cocksuckers at HBO and ESPN,
Couldn't put Humpty's fucking egg back together again.
Trading money for your goddam egg. What kind of a fucking bargain is that? Let me backtrack a little--sort of like Goldilocks should have done, when she was knocking on Kappa Sig’s door at two o’clock in the morning at the University of Virginia. Guess I ought to let you know something--I'm drunk--stinking drunk. It helps my egg relax when I'm trying to think. I stayed up for three days and nights trying to finish this goddam book or whatever you want to call it. I took 12 hits of speed, did 4 grams of coke (Peruvian Snowflake, it's better than Colombian), and drank 2 gallons of Old Crow and the best part of a quart of absinthe--the little green fairy stuff. I'm drunk and speeding like a cat with gasoline poured all over its ass and lit with a Zippo. Old Crow is old man booze. It's rotgut. That's all they had at the store down the street. There was a playoff game and they had a run on booze. I’ve never had absinthe before. It’s supposed to make you see things like little green fairies. Artists and writers in Paris a long time ago claimed it helped them be more creative, let them free the muse. I’m seeing things, but I don’t think it’s the absinthe because the kind we get in America doesn’t have the right kind of wormwood in it. The right kind of wormwood--the kind you get in France or Europe--has Thujone in it, which is a kind of natural speed that makes you see things--like little green fairies. That Sawbones doctor gives me another kind of speed. Ritalin. It's decent speed, nothing great. He says it helps my brain catch up and function normally--almost. They give the same shit to kids with ADHD. Giving speed to eight-year-old boys and bored housewives. I'm not sure about those sawbones sometimes, especially the ones who run medical schools at colleges that have football teams. I'll get to that later. I'll get to college presidents later too. They're the big bosses who live in the big white mansions on the hill to the doctors who run medical schools at colleges that have football teams. I dedicated this book to college presidents because when you think about it, they're the cocksuckers who keep the egg-cracking business going. They live in those pretty, tall white mansions up on the hill at your favorite college (university, if you prefer), drinking Mint Juleps on the veranda and watching the boys play football. And they usually have a pretty good view of the other tall white mansions down on fraternity row where there's a whole other sort of busting business going on, with pretty young Goldilocks knocking at the door.
College presidents spit shine and polish up young eggs so they can become better egg crackers for the NFL, while servants bring them trays full of food. Spit shine and polish them up so good it’ll make your dick hard. Maybe you remember that other thing Abbie Hoffman said. He said a lot of things. You might not even know who he is, but here is something else Abbie Hoffman said, “The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.” I think he was onto something. I don't advocate violence of any kind, even though I was a linebacker in the NFL. Abbie Hoffman was a Yippie. All the Yippies are dead, just like everything else from the sixties that sounded sort of like a good idea: hippies, peace and love, instant karma, entitlement programs, free love, free lunches, freedom, Marxism, Feminism. The fatal flaw of Hippie was treating women like shit. The dudes in Hippie got a super deal, free and clear pussy, an all-you-care-to-eat dessert bar. The women got the clap and the kids, the shit end of the stick as usual. Somebody always loses in a three-way. The fatal flaw of Feminism was treating women like shit, leading them like cows with nose rings who’d chew the cud of whatever these newly minted university intellectuals could spew into the trough. The three-way for the feminists was being placated by the ossified university phalluses who threw them the bone in the form of faux academic Gender Studies programs. Feminism’s final coffin nail was Google Porn, or free will, as the Googlers like to spin it. It goes by another name: Corporate Greed. Google makes more money in a weekend by providing free-and-clear access to pornography than the gross domestic product of all the countries below the equator combined. Google’s genius was putting one degree of separation between flat-out exploitation (the dirty work) and the bank. And it turned out that women like to watch porn and whack off to porn just like guys like to watch porn and whack off to porn. Hence, we now live in a masturbatory culture--a society of satiety--that is content with having a date with a plastic device rather than a person--an information technology economy built on the slimy bedrock of pornography. The feminists, distracted by their stillborn gender victim academia, didn’t factor into their Rube Goldberg machine calculus that free will, in the form of soothing the pleasure receptors of the brain, is a goddam hard thing to put into a box and contain, much less understand and codify and try to override. Once those circuits have been activated, they demand constant dilatation, something that comes in the form of exploitation of others (the Dalit caste), with seemingly no ill effects for the exploiter. Football players occupy the Dalit caste, the untouchables. We expect them do the lower-order work that is subordinate to the consumer, the viewer, the college student, the college president pimp-ocracy, the drunk fat-fuck in the stands--me and you. But with dilatation comes curettage--and that painful procedure is long overdue if the patient is to survive.