North Dallas Forty Read Online Free PDF Page A

and a glove box full of grass.
    Postgame parties were outrageous. Players bottle up a lot of fear and frustration trying to maintain a tone during a week’s practice and a Sunday afternoon. It all comes spilling out after the game. Compound that with amphetamines, taken to maintain a pitch before and during the game. The effect of the speed didn’t end with the gun. Mix liquor and adrenaline with the aforementioned ingredients in a two-hundred-sixty-pound container, multiply it by about twenty and you have a postgame team party. Mix only liquor and fear and you had tonight’s party. The results promised to be awesome.
    Postgame parties had another special catalyst—wives. The public displays of mutual disaffection were always intriguing. They constantly renewed my belief in divorce as the only sane American Institution. At times like those, I considered my divorce as my only true success. There were more punches thrown between player and wife than there ever were between player and player. Few football teams could withstand the disharmony that several of my teammates incorporated into their marriages with the utmost of ease. The amount of bodily harm these marriage partners inflicted on each other was amazing. Physical violence was a daily component of their marital give-and-take. The real offenders were the women. They took to violence much quicker than their husbands. The favorite weapons are usually heavy cut-glass articles like vases and ash trays. Makes for a gory wound.
    During my short, violent marriage, the wives had attempted several times to organize against the unbridled insanity of postgame parties. They were tired of their husbands acting like animals in public, even if the public was only other teammates.
    There was a curious, subtle homosexual bond that united the wives in their battles against the husbands and vice versa. The men shared the dark secrets of locker rooms, training camps, and road games. No matter the cost, these secrets were never to be shared with the wives. The women used baby showers and bridge games as strategy sessions for counterattacks against this chauvinistic secret society. The wives swapped rumors, suspicions, facts, and fantasies for later use on unsuspecting spouses. Favorite times for wifely sapper raids were just before coitus or while packing for a road trip. “Judith Ann said Seth was with her Thursday. So, where were you?”
    Like most wives, ours aspired for better, more genteel lives and began to plan the team parties like debutante balls. Power plays would be carried out in full dress.
    One Sunday in late October, I had struggled home after a disappointing loss to Baltimore. My wife met me at the door dressed in a bunny suit. The wives had planned a Halloween party. I realized the worst of my day was yet to come.
    “Hurry up and put this on.” She held out an identical hollow rabbit for me. (Now, I must explain, so our behavior doesn’t seem aberrant but merely intense, that social status was distributed among the wives according to the husband’s current status with the team. This shaky dependence on their husbands for identity made wives hypersensitive to any deviant behavior. My wife was constantly concerned that I might fuck up, and I did.)
    I refused to put on the costume.
    After spending the afternoon sweating, bleeding, and baring my soul in a losing cause, I wasn’t going to dress in a fluffy white tail and long pink ears and meet my teammates for a drink.
    “You don’t care about me,” she cried. “You don’t care about anybody but yourself. I’m in charge of the refreshments. You have to wear a costume.”
    “Oh, for Christ sake, I refuse to go to the Sheraton ballroom looking like the Easter bunny.”
    “It’s not Easter. It’s Halloween.” She wiped her nose with a little white paw.
    “Look, I’ve already made a fool of myself in front of seventy-six thousand people.” (I had dropped the one pass that might have broken the game open.)