“No, not a thing,” I said, and finished the remains of my cocktail.
THE MAN FOR THE JOBBY GARY PHILLIPS
No, how the hell could I be Wilson Pickett?”
“Oh, right. Sorry,” the square mumbled as I stepped out of the cab. He went down the street the way he’d been heading when he stopped to ask me that bullshit.
“You sure this is where you want me to let you?”
“Ain’t no sweat, man, I can handle it.” I peeled off some bills and handed them to the driver. On the backseat was a folded newspaper and an article about that bald chick, the singer, Shanay, Sinbad, whatever the fuck, and how she’d joined some kind of Catholic cult and was calling for the Pope to renounce Beelzebub. Hilarious.
“Enjoy your stay, sir.” He touched his cap and put his hack in gear. The car was just like the kind I’d seen roving around London, only there weren’t as many of them here. You’d think they’d be stacked up at the hotel I was staying at, but the doorman hipped me to hoof over to O’Connell Street, where I found some lined up.
I snuggled my upturned collar closer to my neck and put the zipper of my leather jacket all the way up. When you got the crawlies like I had, everything is like constant heated pins poking from beneath your skin. Plus the goddamn cold, which I wasn’t a fan of to begin with-gloomy weather was all up in my ass. I looked across a section of the park and could see the projects, or estates as they called them over here, just beyond.
Walking head down, hands tucked away, I knew deep inside but wouldn’t fess up that I was two steps from being certified a fool. I could have been back in my comfortable hotel room, hands roaming all over Molly, Mary, or whatever the fuck was the name of the honey who’d started conversing with me in that pub after the game at Lansdowne.
“I’ve seen you play before,” she said, her liquid browns steady on me.
I’d been giving her and a couple of her girlfriends the glance. They’d started whispering and giggling to each other after me and some of the others from the Dragons and the Claymores had strolled into the joint. The teams had come to Dublin to play an exhibition game at the stadium normally used for rugby and soccer. The stands weren’t nearly as full for us as they would be for their own games, but the curiosity factor and that football, my kind of football, involved its own slamming and swearing got some of the natives out to see us. What the fuck, slappin’ heads was slappin’ heads.
And where you had muscular dudes grappling and tearing at each other, you had the type of woman who dug that kind of action-and not just to watch.
“When was that?” I said, moving to give her space at the bar. She leaned in.
“In Chicago. I lived there for a while. Had a job selling dog products.”
“Dog products?”
“Flea-control solutions, chewy treats, that sort of rubbish.”
I liked her toothy smile. Well, okay, I also liked the fact she had some guns straining that sweater she was wearing. Those bad boys were calling my name. But damn, she knew I was looking. She was too. “So you saw me on TV?”
“Live and in color,” she said, assessing me up and down like a coach figuring out if I was first-string or pine-rider. “Soldier Field. The Falcons against the Bears, before they were in the Central Division. You had two touchdowns for Atlanta.” She paused, considering something, then said, “I believe you shook your arse at the crowd after that second one.”
I gave her my gee-whiz Urkel bit. Babes like a motha-fuckah to be self-effacing and shit. “Just trying to keep the fun in the game. Say did we-?”
“No, Zelmont, we didn’t. All your women blur in your mind, do they?” She’d lit a cigarette and let the smoke float between us.
“It’s not that, it’s just, you know, when you’re on the road during the season, shit just gets jumbled. ’Course, it’s not like I’d forget you.”
She knew it was bullshit, but it wasn’t as if we were carrying on a romance like in one of them whack Merchant Ivory flicks I’d been forced to watch once. She knew the score.
And not an hour later, we were doing it freestyle in my room and I had my hands and lips all over her gorgeous tatas.
“I know this is going to sound off,” I said later as we lay in bed, my hand rubbing her firm, what she’d call it? Arse. Hilarious.
“You’re mad for me and want me to journey to your mansion in America with ya?” She said it in that kind of exaggerated Irish accent they used to do in those old black-and-whites where some stooped-over gray-haired dame played Jimmy Cagney’s mother.
“Right,” I said, gently squeezing one of her breasts, getting a moan out of her. She put her hand on mine. “Do you know where to cop some crack? Get some, I mean.”
She laughed down in her throat. “Good thing I was in the States. Over here, crack means to fart and the craic means, well, means the good life. Which,” and her amber eyes crinkled at the edges, “I guess is a kind of way of looking at it. Though lately that slang has found its way here, meaning what you mean.”
I had no goddamn idea what the fuck she was talking about. I was needing, but had enough sense to know it was best not to go off and probably screw up what might be my only connection, and my only chance of doing the nasty again before I had to light out tomorrow.
She reached across me for the phone on the night stand, those wonderful titties mashing against my chest. “Let me make a few calls, darling.”
And that’s how I found myself staring, confused, at a sign. I figured the burning in my head had bored a hole in it and the crack cravings had me seeing mirages and what not. But then I remembered that Connolley, our backup quarterback, had been over here before to see some cousins and had mentioned that it wasn’t unusual to see signs in Gaelic.
I sniffed, resisting the urge to scratch my itching, the invisible ants marching up and down my arms in sneakers with spikes. I tried to get rid of the image of hundreds of those tiny pincer jaws taking little chunk after little chunk out of my flesh. There was a sign in English just to the left of the Irish one, but the only reason I’d stopped was not to locate myself, but to get psyched. I was on a field I hadn’t played on before, and had better be on my J.
Maura, yeah, that was her name, had told me that this place, Ballymun, was going through renovations. There was a main street running through the middle with brown and gray buildings on either side, and three tall main towers standing out. I didn’t grow up in the projects but had been in more than a few in my time for one reason or another. Lately, though, it had been for the reason I was here now after being given my walking papers from the NFL for failing a random drug test, and getting bounced to the European league.
And it ain’t like I was 24-7 on the pipe. I wasn’t no weak-kneed dope fiend. It was just that my gimpy hip had been giving me fits again and I’d been hiding that precious detail from the docs. But if I asked for more than the usual allotment of painkillers, they’d know something was up. Hell, if you played ball for more than two years you just naturally needed some kind of legal narcotic cocktail to dull the constant throb from that sprained ankle that never had much of a chance to heal, or the tingle you never lost in your hamstring when you had to cut sharp down field. That was expected. The league’s croakers knew what to give you for that shit, that was the ordinary.