Jocks Pointing Heavenward

Ch. 5 of An Evening With God

Eric Blumenthal Jr, the non-rapist, didn’t see any point in hanging around Palo Alto when he could be earning millions in the National Football League, and was known to be declaring early eligibility for its annual draft after his remarkable freshman season with the Cardinal. The team’s head coach, Eddie Stouffer, contacted Eric Sr., and said he was in town and wanted to take him to lunch. Before becoming one of the country’s most successful college coaches, Stouffer had himself starred at USC, and then with the Jacksonville Jaguars in the NFL. What could be more wonderful than Hall of Fame football player Eddie Stouffer playing the man-to-man card with Eric, one-time co-captain of his high school’s debate team? Eric loved Eddie’s apparently being prepared to lay it on that thick to try to keep Junior from deserting him, and didn’t mention that he hadn’t spoken to his son in months.

How did one shake a Hall of Famer’s hand. Firmly, of course, very firmly, but in the traditional thumbs-up way, or in some new way that Eddie’s players probably preferred? It turned out that Eddie would settle for nothing less than a brief embrace, including three manly pats on the back. “It’s so great to meet you!” Eddie rumbled as the hostess at the steakhouse Eric had guessed he’d like led them to their table.

It was a Thursday, and a great many jocks turned investment advisors and lawyers were chowing down manfully. Several seemed to recognize Eddie. Eddie and Eric had hardly been handed their menus when a pair of the lapsed jocks came over, said they had been big fans of Eddie during his playing career, and asked if they might get a selfie. Eddie looked at Eric apologetically and asked if Eric might take the photo. Eddie, in the middle, put an arm around each of his thrilled-to-death acolytes. Eric took pains to compose the photo really badly, in the way that strangers one asks to take photos invariably do. About three-eighths of the frame had the three men in it, beneath a vast expanse of wasted space at the top of the frame, and a lesser one to the right. “Hey,” one of the former jocks said as Eric returned the phone and slid back into the booth, “You’re somebody too, right?”

“Hey, yeah,” his friend said. “You’re that guy on TV.”

He and Eddie studied their menus. Their server came. Eddie ordered a dry-aged tomahawk ribeye, medium rare, and Eric pretended to be unable to find the vegetarian section on the menu. The server looked at Eddie in confusion and told Eric, “At this time, sir, we don’t actually have any vegetarian options. We’re like…a steakhouse?” Eric ordered two baked potatoes with a side of creamed corn.

“You should have said something, dude,” Eddie said. “I had no idea you.were a vegan.” He pronounced it to rhyme with beggin’.

“I’m not,” Eric said. “I’m a vegetarian. Anthony Bourdain described vegans as the Hezbollah of non-meat eaters.”

Eddie, with no idea what or whom his new bestie was talking about, wasn’t liking this very much at all, and that, of course, was the idea. Someone else came over for an autograph and Eddie told him to get lost. Their food arrived, and Eddie clearly felt gratifyingly funny about attacking the huge slab of lurid beef on his plate while Eric had two potatoes, artfully arranged in the kitchen, flanking a ramequin of creamed corn.

Eddie tried to tenderise Eric, telling him how much he enjoyed his TV show, even though it wasn’t shown north of San Luis Obispo, and speculating that Eric must have been quite a jock himself at one point. Though of course delighted, Eric, busy with one of his potatoes, neither confirmed nor denied.

Eddie sighed and dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin and said, “As I’d bet you’ve guessed, what I really wanted to talk to you about was Eric Jr.’s intention to leave us high and dry at QB next season. That would be a terrible blow to the program, but much more than that, I think your boy would be doing himself a terrible disservice. If you’ll allow me to say so, I think he may still have some significant maturity issues at this point, and another year as Stanford’s starting QB might be just what the doctor ordered in terms of getting his feet on the ground.”

“Wow,” Eric said. “If I understand what you’re saying, it’s my son you’re most concerned about, and not your football team.”

“Keep it up, you pathetic little pussy,” Stouffer’s eyes said, “and I’ll pull your pants down right in the middle of the restaurant, just like me and my teammates in high school used to do i to pathetic little pussies like you.” What he actually said, though, was, “Well, I’m very concerned about both. You know. His education and everything.”

“See,” Eric said, “I would have guessed otherwise. The illiteracy rate among your players is thought to be the second highest of any Division 1 school in the country. And the percentage of your players who actually leave with a degree is fourth lowest.”

How very sweet, how incalculably sweet, the anguish in Stouffer’s eyes. Only a remarkable exertion of will was keeping him from grabbing Eric’s creamed corn and pouring it down the front of Eric’s shirt.

“Can you help me out here, dude?” he managed. “I’d really appreciate that.”

Another former jock came over with his cell phone in hand. What very, very bad timing. “Yo, Coach Stouffer,” he said, “any chance of getting a selfie with you?”

Eric’s guess was that his dining companion probably much preferred being thought of as a brilliant athlete than as a coach. Stouffer had to be cordial to Eric, from whom he wanted something, but no holds were barred with this new intruder, to whom, with teeth gritted and eyes narrowed, he said, “If you’re not out of my line of vision by the time I’ve blinked twice, dipshit, your phone’s going halfway up your large intestine.”

His expression as he turned back to Eric asked, “Message received, dude?” Eric’s natural submissiveness kicked in. He was on the verge of saying, “I’ll see what I can do,” when the server saved him, stopping by to chirp, “How’s that ribeye working for you?”

“I’ve had better,” Stouffer grumbled, having eaten exactly one little piece of his steak. “I’ve had much better. In fact, take it the fuck away.” The server’s jaw dropped. Stouffer slid out of the booth, snatched a $100 bill from his wallet, and tossed it on the table. “Real pleasure meeting you,” he told Eric with more malice than anyone had ever thought to season that valediction with.

Eric wasn’t a vegetarian, and quite happily polished off the 95 percent of the $78 centre cut fillet that Stouffer hadn’t touched, thinking as he did so that he would tell his viewers about the experience in detail on his TV show.

Stouffer called him from the airport. He was sorry. He’d been under a lot of pressure. He really would appreciate it if…

“Save it, Stuffy,” Eric said, though he was unaware of anyone ever having addressed the great man by that diminutive. “Ain’t going to happen.”

Such was the volume at which Stouffer responded that he drowned out the planes taking off outside his terminal. “Ain’t going to happen?” he roared. “Well, stick it where the sun don’t shine, you little faggot. And just for the record, what you said about players thanking the Lord Jesus Christ when they score a touchdown? That was sick, and sickening. How somebody like you can go on TV with filth like that…It makes me sick!”

“A point very forcefully made,” Eric chuckled. “Have a nice next season, Stuffy.”

KSAA’s program director was a Christian evangelical right-winger, albeit a reasonably nice guy, and was appalled by Eric’s editorial about jocks pointing heavenward. He confessed that he couldn’t even begin to fathom how anyone could object to giving Jesus his due, but didn’t take Eric off the air, possibly because no show on the channel had ever enjoyed a ratings spike comparable to that following the editorial.

Lots of fellow journalists phoned Eric asking for interviews. The one he enjoyed most was with the editor of dont-tread_on_me.com, who began their Zoom call livid and then got progressively angrier. “Why does The Lord help ball players score TDs and hit homers while the residents of shithole countries nobody’s ever heard of starve is that the ball players believe in him and the shitholers don’t. Is that really so hard for somebody like you to figure out?

“Not exactly the sharpest steak knife in the drawer, are you, bud? If I were you, I’d try to be more like your boy. A fantastic quarterback and a fantastic Christian in the bargain, like so many of the best QBs are.”

Junior a Christian? Eric got on line and confirmed it. He read an interview on thelordismyshepherd.com in which Junior said that being falsely accused of the second worst crime in the world had led him to Jesus. “All my life,” he was (undoubtedly mis)quoted as saying, “in spite of the great success I’ve had in athletics, I’ve felt an emptiness I couldn’t put my finger on. It took being falsely accused to make me realize that the emptiness was the hole in my heart where Jesus should have been.”

The emptiness he couldn’t put his finger on. Eric really liked that! “I have no doubt in my mind,” Junior continued, “that with Jesus guiding me, I will become not just a better football player, but also a better person.”

Oh, that sounded just like Junior!

Eric speculated that one of two things had resulted in his son’s being born again. Maybe the lawyers Stanford had hired to clear him of the rape charge had told him proclamations of having been born again would look good to the Christian Republican judge who’d been assigned the case. Or maybe one of the agents pursuing him had told Junior that feigning piety was likely to get him more and richer endorsement deals.

Eric was going to call and going to call and going to call, and didn’t, not until after Junior had been the third pick in the NFL draft. Eric wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but he was pleased, knowing how incensed Junior would be, about two others — a ferocious Nigerian linebacker from Nebraska, and a fellow quarterback, Sean McElhatton, from Notre Dame — being picked before him. Eric had seen it on his son’s face when his name was chosen and he went on stage to allow the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, who’d parlayed a bunch of felicitously located parking lots into a real estate fortune, to put a Chiefs baseball cap on his head while Junior held up a Chiefs jersey with his name on it and grinned unconvincingly. Kansas friggin’ City? Junior had almost certainly had his sights set on New York or Los Angeles, or even San Francisco or Boston. And the second pick was Sean friggin’ McElhatton, who threw more three more TD passes last season than Junior did, but who had an All-American wide receiver to look for, whereas Junior did not?

Eric couldn’t have read the situation more accurately. When he phoned Junior for the first time in five months, three days after the draft, AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” was playing very loudly wherever Junior was, and his speech was slurred. A voice yelled, “Oh, yeah, baby! Shake ‘em! Shake those things!”

A strip club? A strip club for born-agains, maybe?

“How you doing, son?” Eric said, and then said again, and then said a third time because Junior hadn’t heard him over AC/DC the first two times.

“Fan-fucking-tastic!” said the new convert to Christianity slurredly. “Picked third in the draft. Why not just have me come up on stage and let each of the owners have a turn shitting on me? Fuckers!” As he did it again, Eric realized that it was his son yelling, “Shake those fucking things,” not in the tone of someone enjoying an afternoon’s titillation, but hoping to be told to pipe down so that he could break the nose of whoever did the telling.

“Your best revenge, son,” Eric said, “is going to be winning the starting job with the Chiefs. Young Mr. McElhatton has a lot stiffer competition in New York.”

“You call that shaking?” Junior roared furiously at whomever he’d been trying to exhort. He hadn’t heard a word Eric had said. And they were no longer connected.

Junior won the starting job, Sean McElhatton played one quarter of one game. The ferocious Nigerian linebacker’s 49ers didn’t play the Chiefs, but inspired terror in the teams he did play against. He was named Rookie of the Year, but was as surly off the field as he was on it, and it was Junior who was offered the most endorsements among the rookies. He did a commercial for North America’s second biggest food conglomerate’s new vegan line, asking someone playing a teammate for a bite of his sandwich, and pronouncing it V-lectable, a pun on delectable, a word that Eric would have bet Jr. wouldn’t have been able to define. He did a public service announcement about prostate cancer, and came across, against all odds, as soulful and compassionate.

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