When the Nines Roll Over by David Benioff

Author:David Benioff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

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Fourteen years later I was at home by myself, watching a rental movie on the VCR, an old James Cagney gangster flick. Midway through came a few seconds of static and then two sweating black men, one of them on his knees giving the other a blow job. For almost a minute I stared at the screen, trying to figure out what all this had to do with bank heists, fedoras, Tommy guns. The man getting sucked off had the most amazing smile on his face—the gates of paradise were opened wide and he was marching through, saints by his side. I’ve never smiled like that, I said to myself; I never will smile like that. What am I doing with this life?

It’s not what you’re thinking. I didn’t decide that what I really needed was a blow job from a black man. Maybe that’s exactly what I need, maybe that’s the cure for all that ails me, but that’s not where my mind was going. I thought: this is me, this is how it goes, not one movie with logical plot progression but a wild medley of every genre: porno and screw-ball comedy and teen romance and horror. No cowboys, not yet, and no starships, but give it time.

I pushed the stop button and imagined the laughter of some bored prankster, rubbing his palms with glee as he hatched this scheme weeks or months before. Whoever he was, he knocked me for a loop. I sat on the sofa for an hour with the lights and television off, with no beer in my hand, with no sounds at all to disturb me except the occasional car passing on Rickover Street.

I had always expected to be famous. I figured I’d play professional football and there would be a room in Mahlus High devoted to my memorabilia; I would appear with my model wife in television commercials for the United Way; in the postgame interviews my quarterback would never forget to thank me for saving his ass. Things didn’t work out. Senior year of college I broke my neck blocking on a halfback sweep; I was paralyzed for sixteen hours and the doctors thought it might be for life. The surgeons fused two vertebrae and a month later I was relearning how to walk.

My father sat with me in the hospital room day after day. One morning I started crying and could not stop. I told him how sorry I was, because I knew how much he loved watching me play. I told him that it felt like I had lost a fight, the fight, that I wasn’t tough enough, and my father shook his head and said there never was a fight. It was just an accident. I said it was a fight and I lost. My father could not look at me. He watched the floor and repeated that it was just an accident, and even if it was a fight, there was no shame in losing a fight—everyone but Rocky Marciano did.

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