OF BEEF AND FIRE
The first time I saw Troy Aikman, he was admiring a Frieda Kahlo painting with a mild look of jollity in his football-shaped eyes. To see him there, shiftlessly combing through his hair with two chapped hands, you would think he had a date with that unsightly painting on the chilly Tuesday afternoon that followed the beginning of the New Year. I couldn’t believe this was the man notoriously referred to as “Doctor Shang” by the British press. His benign stance and the long knife holstered to his side created a charming paradox, like Shakespeare’s noble savage Caliban. However, as the years passed, evidence for every slight against the legendary quarterback presented itself in his erratic behavior, viz.: Troy’s addiction to pudding, Troy’s perverse collection of antebellum theatrical props, Troy periodically throwing a dish at my head from across the room and then collecting the shards in a paisley bandana. However, none of those future events bothered me as I approached the retired athlete with whom I had made engagements to meet at the Dallas Art Museum. I had just said hello when Troy dropped a long bomb on me, as he was known to do during his first encounter with anyone.
“Time for erotic cat impressions,” he claimed in response to my greeting. Immediately his back arched and both hands began to claw gracefully at the space directly above him. For all the spiritual preparation I had done in private before this highly anticipated meeting, I now stared at Dallas Cowboy Troy Aikman with all the courage of a man in a diaper. Fear pulsed in my veins, and the words in my throat choked me like wiener stew. Through the tears, I watched Troy’s mouth snarl vehemently into a wide mess of teeth and fleshy lagniappes.
The terror of this gaping scene caught my attention quicker than a banjo thicket revival; but the Lord works in mysterious grocery stores, where foodstuffs write the world we live in and they’re always glad you came. With a newfound open-mindedness not innate to the American Southerner, I decided to roll with the punches and continue the study I had in mind. After a minute or so, I was even more intrigued—clearly, Troy gave off a life-affirming energy that secretly infected everyone around him like Mad-Cow disease. The last time this much excitement flowed through me, I was overthrowing the Peace Corps in Honduras. I remember the sun reflecting off his teeth from the gaping skylights above us; and as I tore up my museum ticket and deftly guided my hand to sprinkle the shredded bits onto Aikman’s prowling head, I knew Christmas would come a lot sooner this time around.
The years ahead gave us many fine evenings in Troy’s abode, which he had dispassionately named “Urbanshire.” And indeed, Troy’s home was something worth seeing. On my first visit I was led from room to room like an employee in training, shown how to adjust each room’s light scheme and taught to operate Troy’s delightful remote-controlled toilet with painstaking detail. Twenty minutes of lecturing accompanied the study of a glazed brick wall Troy erected himself, made to partition his pinball machines from his pool table. The rails along the stairway were polished so diligently that I continually checked my hand for wetness after touching them. At the last stop before the kitchen, where the drink I had been offered a long time ago was either waiting to be made or melting in the glass, Troy showed me some of his awards. Surprisingly, not all of them were related to football. He had a certificate from a mail-order poetry contest, a leadership award from some all-star training camp where he delivered a speech on the first day, and a championship belt from the Texas State Fair eating contest. When I joked about the irony of bestowing a belt upon Texas’ biggest eater, Troy grabbed it from my hands and said, “That’s not funny,” with the most unexpected measure of seriousness.
I had come a long way across the pock-marked road that some say leads to Mt. Kubrick, but as I looked at the faceless side of Troy’s head I began to wonder why I had stopped at this specific point. The earlier sense of adventure in me had successfully precluded all the reasoning which should have told me I would not learn anything from Troy, that I was not the invincible descendant of Rambo’s three sons that Troy convinced me I was.
After a round of cocktails on the balcony he built himself, Troy fed me pepperoni sandwiches and haystack cookies until I fell asleep in an easy chair near the fireplace. Several hours passed, and only once was I partially wakened by the sensation of chapped hands running through my hair; but when I opened my eyes in response, no one was in front of me. Eventually I was completely jarred to consciousness by realizing that sleep is only proper when there are other guests to entertain the host; and it seemed odd that Troy was gazing at me from a chair across the room as I reluctantly left the foggy underworld of dreams and illusion.
I looked over and saw Troy’s wife, Rhonda, entering through the archway that joined the den and the room of weird stage props that smelled faintly of butter. Looking coldly at a woman made me think of my father, and his last words to me: “I’m sorry I never sent you candy from jail.” He had broken my mother’s heart, and gone away to spend twelve stony years in Sing Sing. For the rest of his life he talked about the candy there, and the crude kites the inmates constructed from playing cards and telephone wire. When he died my mother had no one to turn to, and she eventually went the way of the pewter debutante.
Since the end of that hilarious time in my life, I have had only Sarah and a lot of delusions about what football really was in the early ‘90s. Sometimes I wanted her in my arms, and my shoulders tingled with fancy: but strangers often reduced this to a repressed desire for compacting women into cubes. Sometimes I wanted to turn Sarah into my mother and make her throw me the football again, like Saturday mornings in the field behind our house. In dreams I saw Mother rubbing taffy into Jay Leno’s hair as he kicked in his wheelchair and screamed about hot piping, and for days on end the only escape was watching large men tussle over the ball I knew so well. More than ever, the NFL took hold of me when Troy launched a pass that connected him to someone fifty yards away. For all the suspenseful precision of that spiraled trajectory, it could have been someone so much farther removed: a hundred miles away, or twenty years away with no known geographical location to aim at.
My mind touches back to an evening some time ago, an evening blown in by trade winds and tired people coming home from work on I-35. A glazed duck was set at the middle of table, and not five seconds had passed when Troy announced I couldn’t have any because I wasn’t a real Texan. I protested this, citing my birthplace as Lewisville—but Dr. Shang aptly countered this point by claiming Lewisville had been annexed from Mexico only five years ago. Troy’s professorial sharpness only emerged when he was sharing some fact that had no basis in reality. Perhaps this man had been sacked one too many times, although I doubt it: but he definitely had. Understanding the duck as a case quite closed, I asked him for a story instead. He winked rudely.
“I can think of a good story that involves you,” Troy began, addressing me but casting a sidelong glance toward his wife. Of course I knew the story was related to the Cowboys/Redskins game of November 1994, when, even though Troy sustained a serious tackling that had caused his helmet to pop off in the first quarter, it was me who had gone home limping and bandaged after the stands finally emptied. He began to describe his private observations, made during the final minutes of the game: the self-centered, internecine hostilities among teammates grubbing for victory in the freezing slush of that Autumn evening. They didn’t even know it was Troy’s birthday.
The gut-wrenching pressure of the fourth down had converted Troy to a cold, calculating automaton, bent on making a pass and avoiding the post-game tickling that was assuredly rendered on those found responsible for the loss of a game. He described scenes of bondage, and finger jabs so harshly applied as to induce vomiting and leave fingernail gashes that required a wad of cotton under the bandage: how could such punishment fail to bring about the quality passes Troy delivered during his career?
Espying a frantic receiver downfield, Troy let loose the football and saw it catch the gamboling winds. It flew like the soul of an exalted priest rising to Heaven, leaving his decrepit mortal shell slumped over a coiled pretzel. And as I repeat that gesture now before Sarah, it has more significance than the great lie that is the Holocaust.
From the lowest base of the stands, I shot Troy the “give me the goo” look as he marched up field to take his new position at the 23rd yard-line, a number which he noted as a resounding appeal to his persistence. And with a knack for interpretation, I would say his frozen face begged for a taste of death—exodus from the violence and sensation of this water-logged pistachio we call the Tree of Musketeers. But I would never let that happen, not even if my digestive tract were no more than mere macaroni. Someone nearby said, “Aikman’s not the boner I found in pants this morning,” but others were not so kind nor incomprehensible. Every time I tried to venerate Troy’s name aloud, a drizzle of cheap whiskey dampened my 19th century lumberjack frock. I tilted my head back and meowed with vexation.
And that’s when it happened, according to Troy. He was only twenty feet from me at the time, toweling the icy sweat from his tow-headed scalp and peacefully watching me as I gave him praises. Those words proved to be my undoing that fine evening. The yellow hand of some eavesdropping sports fundamentalist slammed against my back, sending me spiraling from my wuthering heights of penmanship to a dreary pit of pencildom. “Wheet’s gremus!” I screamed as my balance forsook me and my head began to jag downward over the railing. At the bottom, a hard deal of pavement caught me like a jealous lover: scratching open my head while receiving numerous blows from my hands and knees. I was hurt pretty badly, but Troy had won the game; and it was clear that for the rest of eternity he was going to march in the divine procession of heroes that never once toted anything more hazardous than a sack of air.
“Blah blah chung,” Sarah said loudly into my ear as I regained consciousness. I could not help but smell only lightly of the season, as the splintered breaks in my ribs constricted any further breathing: that sweet season that has so many homes, and a son in Montpelier with empty, bruised eye sockets. Tessellated laurels of dead autumn leaves were everywhere, packed in fistfuls of glassy ice. Along FM-3668 the scarecrows gyrated profanely and whisked me away to the golden pasture of gentle thieves. Hearty mattresses stuffed with pan-fried potatoes wheeled in the sky over a world of worthless minstrels wrapped in denim, only vaguely disguised as clouds on a gray afternoon.
For a moment I wanted to die, but after a few hours in Urbanshire the issue was no longer pressing. I left Troy’s home that night like I did the Dallas stadium in ’94: only this time there was no one to wipe away the tears and the globs of pudding.
Do they have napkins in Heaven? Are we ranked by our earthly accomplishments, and unable to further grow as a person for all eternity? Every man wants to march across the sky and hang his bib on the stars: the same stars from which man’s sorrows and ambitions originally emanated. There’s just not enough time, and much less when you use some to sit down and measure out all the pieces you need to fashion this faraway end goal. From Troy I learned that living in the moment is for the senile: we have to throw things into our future. You too will see how this is different from simply manipulating the circumstances of the present. Sure, shift everything around like a sack full of car parts... you are not going to hop in that sack and drive out, my friend.
Whatever godlike deity stirred this hot chocolate into action is no concern of mine, and possibly no more than a stimulating pinwheel mounted on the long, passing train of calendar days. After all, life came from the heavens in strange precipitations.
Sometime today, we will all forget that for a long time there was nothing, that the world we’ve made has humble beginnings. Mice rode on tortillas over icy streams of ginger ale, and the moon watched peacefully from His bed like a testicle in a dixie cup. Evolution and agriculture sliced the world into pieces, and the Bible was contrived by an age of men in togas—gallantly wrestling jellied, brown tongues down from the oak trees in Galilee. Just imagining those ancient chilly nights that started it all makes me bristle with envy, and beyond all the penned histories of our race I somehow know what really happened—more than a mouse knows morsel code. The headlines and the photographs are fastened down with a world’s worth of cerebral paste, but the ghosts blow around in the wind like stray balloons. Yes, this haunting is almost gone now in the silvery tide of gravy within and around us; but I can still hear it when the cats finally perish of dehydration, and all that’s left is Troy Aikman staring from some old front page. Behind those silent eyes his voice is clamoring for either my return or his escape, and whispering claims to parcels undreamed of: and as the door clicks shut on that room of irreconcilably outdated furniture and stage props for live performances prior to the Civil War, I know Dr. Shang will not be able to connect me with anyone but him and any time but now when that leather loaf sails from his hand.
“Time for erotic cat impressions,” he claimed in response to my greeting. Immediately his back arched and both hands began to claw gracefully at the space directly above him. For all the spiritual preparation I had done in private before this highly anticipated meeting, I now stared at Dallas Cowboy Troy Aikman with all the courage of a man in a diaper. Fear pulsed in my veins, and the words in my throat choked me like wiener stew. Through the tears, I watched Troy’s mouth snarl vehemently into a wide mess of teeth and fleshy lagniappes.
The terror of this gaping scene caught my attention quicker than a banjo thicket revival; but the Lord works in mysterious grocery stores, where foodstuffs write the world we live in and they’re always glad you came. With a newfound open-mindedness not innate to the American Southerner, I decided to roll with the punches and continue the study I had in mind. After a minute or so, I was even more intrigued—clearly, Troy gave off a life-affirming energy that secretly infected everyone around him like Mad-Cow disease. The last time this much excitement flowed through me, I was overthrowing the Peace Corps in Honduras. I remember the sun reflecting off his teeth from the gaping skylights above us; and as I tore up my museum ticket and deftly guided my hand to sprinkle the shredded bits onto Aikman’s prowling head, I knew Christmas would come a lot sooner this time around.
The years ahead gave us many fine evenings in Troy’s abode, which he had dispassionately named “Urbanshire.” And indeed, Troy’s home was something worth seeing. On my first visit I was led from room to room like an employee in training, shown how to adjust each room’s light scheme and taught to operate Troy’s delightful remote-controlled toilet with painstaking detail. Twenty minutes of lecturing accompanied the study of a glazed brick wall Troy erected himself, made to partition his pinball machines from his pool table. The rails along the stairway were polished so diligently that I continually checked my hand for wetness after touching them. At the last stop before the kitchen, where the drink I had been offered a long time ago was either waiting to be made or melting in the glass, Troy showed me some of his awards. Surprisingly, not all of them were related to football. He had a certificate from a mail-order poetry contest, a leadership award from some all-star training camp where he delivered a speech on the first day, and a championship belt from the Texas State Fair eating contest. When I joked about the irony of bestowing a belt upon Texas’ biggest eater, Troy grabbed it from my hands and said, “That’s not funny,” with the most unexpected measure of seriousness.
I had come a long way across the pock-marked road that some say leads to Mt. Kubrick, but as I looked at the faceless side of Troy’s head I began to wonder why I had stopped at this specific point. The earlier sense of adventure in me had successfully precluded all the reasoning which should have told me I would not learn anything from Troy, that I was not the invincible descendant of Rambo’s three sons that Troy convinced me I was.
After a round of cocktails on the balcony he built himself, Troy fed me pepperoni sandwiches and haystack cookies until I fell asleep in an easy chair near the fireplace. Several hours passed, and only once was I partially wakened by the sensation of chapped hands running through my hair; but when I opened my eyes in response, no one was in front of me. Eventually I was completely jarred to consciousness by realizing that sleep is only proper when there are other guests to entertain the host; and it seemed odd that Troy was gazing at me from a chair across the room as I reluctantly left the foggy underworld of dreams and illusion.
I looked over and saw Troy’s wife, Rhonda, entering through the archway that joined the den and the room of weird stage props that smelled faintly of butter. Looking coldly at a woman made me think of my father, and his last words to me: “I’m sorry I never sent you candy from jail.” He had broken my mother’s heart, and gone away to spend twelve stony years in Sing Sing. For the rest of his life he talked about the candy there, and the crude kites the inmates constructed from playing cards and telephone wire. When he died my mother had no one to turn to, and she eventually went the way of the pewter debutante.
Since the end of that hilarious time in my life, I have had only Sarah and a lot of delusions about what football really was in the early ‘90s. Sometimes I wanted her in my arms, and my shoulders tingled with fancy: but strangers often reduced this to a repressed desire for compacting women into cubes. Sometimes I wanted to turn Sarah into my mother and make her throw me the football again, like Saturday mornings in the field behind our house. In dreams I saw Mother rubbing taffy into Jay Leno’s hair as he kicked in his wheelchair and screamed about hot piping, and for days on end the only escape was watching large men tussle over the ball I knew so well. More than ever, the NFL took hold of me when Troy launched a pass that connected him to someone fifty yards away. For all the suspenseful precision of that spiraled trajectory, it could have been someone so much farther removed: a hundred miles away, or twenty years away with no known geographical location to aim at.
My mind touches back to an evening some time ago, an evening blown in by trade winds and tired people coming home from work on I-35. A glazed duck was set at the middle of table, and not five seconds had passed when Troy announced I couldn’t have any because I wasn’t a real Texan. I protested this, citing my birthplace as Lewisville—but Dr. Shang aptly countered this point by claiming Lewisville had been annexed from Mexico only five years ago. Troy’s professorial sharpness only emerged when he was sharing some fact that had no basis in reality. Perhaps this man had been sacked one too many times, although I doubt it: but he definitely had. Understanding the duck as a case quite closed, I asked him for a story instead. He winked rudely.
“I can think of a good story that involves you,” Troy began, addressing me but casting a sidelong glance toward his wife. Of course I knew the story was related to the Cowboys/Redskins game of November 1994, when, even though Troy sustained a serious tackling that had caused his helmet to pop off in the first quarter, it was me who had gone home limping and bandaged after the stands finally emptied. He began to describe his private observations, made during the final minutes of the game: the self-centered, internecine hostilities among teammates grubbing for victory in the freezing slush of that Autumn evening. They didn’t even know it was Troy’s birthday.
The gut-wrenching pressure of the fourth down had converted Troy to a cold, calculating automaton, bent on making a pass and avoiding the post-game tickling that was assuredly rendered on those found responsible for the loss of a game. He described scenes of bondage, and finger jabs so harshly applied as to induce vomiting and leave fingernail gashes that required a wad of cotton under the bandage: how could such punishment fail to bring about the quality passes Troy delivered during his career?
Espying a frantic receiver downfield, Troy let loose the football and saw it catch the gamboling winds. It flew like the soul of an exalted priest rising to Heaven, leaving his decrepit mortal shell slumped over a coiled pretzel. And as I repeat that gesture now before Sarah, it has more significance than the great lie that is the Holocaust.
From the lowest base of the stands, I shot Troy the “give me the goo” look as he marched up field to take his new position at the 23rd yard-line, a number which he noted as a resounding appeal to his persistence. And with a knack for interpretation, I would say his frozen face begged for a taste of death—exodus from the violence and sensation of this water-logged pistachio we call the Tree of Musketeers. But I would never let that happen, not even if my digestive tract were no more than mere macaroni. Someone nearby said, “Aikman’s not the boner I found in pants this morning,” but others were not so kind nor incomprehensible. Every time I tried to venerate Troy’s name aloud, a drizzle of cheap whiskey dampened my 19th century lumberjack frock. I tilted my head back and meowed with vexation.
And that’s when it happened, according to Troy. He was only twenty feet from me at the time, toweling the icy sweat from his tow-headed scalp and peacefully watching me as I gave him praises. Those words proved to be my undoing that fine evening. The yellow hand of some eavesdropping sports fundamentalist slammed against my back, sending me spiraling from my wuthering heights of penmanship to a dreary pit of pencildom. “Wheet’s gremus!” I screamed as my balance forsook me and my head began to jag downward over the railing. At the bottom, a hard deal of pavement caught me like a jealous lover: scratching open my head while receiving numerous blows from my hands and knees. I was hurt pretty badly, but Troy had won the game; and it was clear that for the rest of eternity he was going to march in the divine procession of heroes that never once toted anything more hazardous than a sack of air.
“Blah blah chung,” Sarah said loudly into my ear as I regained consciousness. I could not help but smell only lightly of the season, as the splintered breaks in my ribs constricted any further breathing: that sweet season that has so many homes, and a son in Montpelier with empty, bruised eye sockets. Tessellated laurels of dead autumn leaves were everywhere, packed in fistfuls of glassy ice. Along FM-3668 the scarecrows gyrated profanely and whisked me away to the golden pasture of gentle thieves. Hearty mattresses stuffed with pan-fried potatoes wheeled in the sky over a world of worthless minstrels wrapped in denim, only vaguely disguised as clouds on a gray afternoon.
For a moment I wanted to die, but after a few hours in Urbanshire the issue was no longer pressing. I left Troy’s home that night like I did the Dallas stadium in ’94: only this time there was no one to wipe away the tears and the globs of pudding.
Do they have napkins in Heaven? Are we ranked by our earthly accomplishments, and unable to further grow as a person for all eternity? Every man wants to march across the sky and hang his bib on the stars: the same stars from which man’s sorrows and ambitions originally emanated. There’s just not enough time, and much less when you use some to sit down and measure out all the pieces you need to fashion this faraway end goal. From Troy I learned that living in the moment is for the senile: we have to throw things into our future. You too will see how this is different from simply manipulating the circumstances of the present. Sure, shift everything around like a sack full of car parts... you are not going to hop in that sack and drive out, my friend.
Whatever godlike deity stirred this hot chocolate into action is no concern of mine, and possibly no more than a stimulating pinwheel mounted on the long, passing train of calendar days. After all, life came from the heavens in strange precipitations.
Sometime today, we will all forget that for a long time there was nothing, that the world we’ve made has humble beginnings. Mice rode on tortillas over icy streams of ginger ale, and the moon watched peacefully from His bed like a testicle in a dixie cup. Evolution and agriculture sliced the world into pieces, and the Bible was contrived by an age of men in togas—gallantly wrestling jellied, brown tongues down from the oak trees in Galilee. Just imagining those ancient chilly nights that started it all makes me bristle with envy, and beyond all the penned histories of our race I somehow know what really happened—more than a mouse knows morsel code. The headlines and the photographs are fastened down with a world’s worth of cerebral paste, but the ghosts blow around in the wind like stray balloons. Yes, this haunting is almost gone now in the silvery tide of gravy within and around us; but I can still hear it when the cats finally perish of dehydration, and all that’s left is Troy Aikman staring from some old front page. Behind those silent eyes his voice is clamoring for either my return or his escape, and whispering claims to parcels undreamed of: and as the door clicks shut on that room of irreconcilably outdated furniture and stage props for live performances prior to the Civil War, I know Dr. Shang will not be able to connect me with anyone but him and any time but now when that leather loaf sails from his hand.