You Gotta Play Hurt by Dan Jenkins

Author:Dan Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books

48

THEM TWINS, T.J. WAS SAYING. Them twins was what was going to do it for TCU next season. With them twins, TCU was going to line them all up and lay wood on their ass.

We were well into our drinking at the bar of T.J.’s choice. We had already laid to waste the barbecue, having eaten the ribs at Sammie’s and then the sliced sandwiches at Angelo’s. Now we were in The Cadaver Room, a hideout bar near All Saints Hospital. College football coaches throughout the nation, as I had known them, all had a secret bar somewhere in the city or campus town, a place where they could drink and relax and not be bothered by wives or fans or the press.

I had spent the first half of my life in hangouts like The Cadaver Room, drinking, eating potato chips, playing the pinball machine, listening to salesmen complain about their unreliable customers, listening to highbrow conversations about niggers, spicks, Jews, A-rabs, queers, and ’57 Mercury Cougars.

Behind the horseshoe bar was Wanda, a voluptuous cowgirl bartender, a woman in her forties, who looked as if life had only done her two favors and she didn’t expect much else.

As an added attraction, six off-duty nurses were crowded around a booth in the back of the room. They were swilling margaritas, letting out whoops, and playing the same song on the jukebox. A country male vocalist named Marty Epps was singing, “His Boil Was So Big, All the Girls Called Him Lance.”

One of the nurses came over to the booth where T.J. and me were drinking and talking. She asked if anybody wanted to waltz.

“We’re senior citizens,” T.J. said.

“Senior citizens is good dancers,” said the nurse, who was a trifle plump for my taste.

“Some are,” T.J. said, “but we got them senior citizen rules we have to live by, you see?”

“What rules is that?”

The plump nurse left us alone after T.J. recited the three rules that senior citizens must live by.

1. Never pass up an opportunity to take a piss.

2. Never trust your first hard-on in the morning.

3. Never trust a fart.

Our privacy ensured, T.J. went back to the twins, the juco running backs.

The coach pronounced their names O-ron-gelo and Lim-on-gelo. This was how the twins themselves pronounced their names, but the correct spelling, I learned, was Orangejello and Limejello.

Orangejello and Limejello Tucker were both six feet three, weighed two twenty-five, and were faster than rent.

The twins came from Milburn Junior College over in East Texas. Before that, the jucos had achieved academic excellence at Mosquito Lake High School outside of Dallas. They had been signed and sealed for Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Texas, and UCLA—all four—until Big Ed Bookman and Billy (Whip-Out) Murdock got involved with their checkbooks.

“How did they come by those names?” I asked.

T.J. said he had asked their mother the same question. The explanation was, she had been working at a Winn Dixie when the twins had been born. She would have named them Winn and Dixie, but that’s what she had named their older sisters.

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