The obliging desk clerk helped us up with our baggage. We stopped at Terry’s door first. He opened it and handed her the key. Before she could enter, a light went on inside and the doorway was bocked by three hundred plus pounds of pro football offensive tackle on the hoof.
“Howdy, guys. Been expectin’ you.” His yawn was high and toothy enough for a dinosaur. “Which one of you’s Niemath?” As he spoke, somewhere up in the stratosphere where his head was, his brain sent a message to his eyes, and he opened them. They were blue, and large and wide enough for a quick dip, if you like alpine pools. “Dumb, huh?” He ducked his elephant-sized head at Terry. “Sure can’t be you, Ma’am.” His bright smile—displaying teeth like those on a brand new harrow—said he’d figured it all out. Terry must be the wife of one of us, and the other must be his new roommate. At the same moment, he realized he’d been standing there in underwear which clearly revealed a genital outline the size of two basketballs and a baseball bat-—or so it seemed. Out of courtesy to the wife of a new teammate, he quickly did his best to cover this with hands like coal shovels. Standing there like that, he even dwarfed Rhino which, believe me, isn’t something even most other football players can do. “Beggin’ your pardon, Missus.” He acknowledged his state of undress and started backing away from the door.
“Y’all hold up just a minute, now!” Terry stopped him. “It’s Ms.”
“Sorry, Ma’am. Guess I ain’t up on that new women’s libber lingo.”
“What I mean, sugah, is that I am Terry Niemath.”
“You’re funnin’ me!” He stared. The effect was like freezing the searchlights at a Hollywood premiere.
“In the flesh!”
“Yes, Ma’am!” There was the kind of enthusiasm in his voice that offensive tackles usually reserve for thick, rare steaks. “I’m Nuke Outlaw.” He remembered to introduce himself.
“Listen,” I interjected, turning to the room clerk. “I think there’s been some mistake.”
“No.” He consulted his list. “Terry Niemath rooms with Nuke Outlaw in 318. That’s the way the team manager set it up.”
“Even so, I think you’d better let us have another room for the lady.”
“I don’t rightly want another room!” Terry pouted.
“I don’t have another room,” the clerk told me. “We’re all filled up. If you hadn’t been with the team I wouldn’t have held yours.”
“All right then,” I said desperately. “Rhino, you room with this gentleman and Terry can room with me.
“My roommate’s supposed to be Terry Niemath.” There was just enough of an edge in Nuke Outlaw’s voice to remind me that he stood almost two feet taller than Muhammad Ali.
“And my roommate’s supposed to be Nuke Outlaw.” Terry removed one of his hands from over his groin and took it between both of hers. The effect was like Fay Wray’s holding King Kong’s paw.
“Rhino—?” I turned to him as my last resort.
His gaze rose from eye-level, which was Nuke Outlaw’s chest, to up around the ceiling where it was met by a look of stubborn possessiveness. “I don’t think so, Steve.” Rhino shook his head with a sigh. “Not even the two of us.”
“See y’all in the mornin’.” Terry sashayed into the room.
“G’night, guys.” Nuke Outlaw closed the door on my nose just as I had decided that duty dictated l should retrieve her.
Duty! Hell, there was more to the first challenge of my new job than Terry Niemath’s over-active libido. There was brawn like I still couldn’t believe, combined with male horniness focused into the single-minded, gridiron-forged concentration of a right tackle determined to get laid. Duty? I’m loyal but I’m not suicidal. Let Charles Putnam try standing between a seven-foot, three-hundred-pound-plus lineman with a hard-on and a willing woman. Not me. After all, she wasn’t even officially a member of the team yet. Technically, my assignment hadn’t started. And, if it had, why then, I guess I’d simply caved in to the first challenge. I’m the Man from O.R.G.Y., a lover, not a fighter.
“Come on, dearie,” I told Rhino. “It’s time for beddy-bye.”
The reason we’d taken a night flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles was that Rhino had thought it important that Terry be in Whittier the next day to meet the new coach. He wasn’t new just to us, but to the rest of the team as well, having been hired as the sixth replacement in two years who was supposed to have the moxie to revitalize the team. He’d called a meeting for nine the next morning, and Rhino wanted Terry there, so she’d start even with the rest of the team.
To make sure of her attendance, Rhino and I stopped off at her room to pick her up. Nuke Qutlaw was with her. His red eyes were slit like oyster shells protecting their pearls. As they walked down the hall in front of us, Terry’s gait reminded me of John Wayne’s after a week or two of busting new broncos. The long legs of her blue jeans formed a mobile parentheses.
We drove the Porsche to the stadium. Despite our prodding, Terry and Nuke were so somnambulistic that we were the last to enter the locker room where the meeting was taking place. The other members of the team had their backs to us, and the coach, who was about to speak, merely peered at us through thick glasses and motioned for us to take seats in the rear. Either the glasses weren’t thick enough, or Nuke’s bulk blocked Terry’s femininity from his vision. It couldn’t have been any ordinary thing to him to have a woman in his locker room. In any case, since Rhino and I shared a philosophy of never facing today what you can put off until tomorrow, we positioned Terry in a chair behind Nuke where she wouldn’t be easily seen. Few coaches, we figured, would take the signing up of a female quarterback in their stride.
The coach rapped for quiet. When he had it, he started speaking. “My name is Newtrokni,” he said. “Coach Newtrokni. My first name is none of your fuckin’ business. You call me ‘Coach’ or ‘Sir.’ I don’t like jokes about my name. I don’t like jokes about Notre Dame, Pat O’Brien, or the Gipper. Player fines start at fifty green ones for those jokes and go up from there. Same for mispronouncin’ my name or puttin’ a ‘K’ on the front of it. Any questions?”
He stood there and waited, as wide as he was tall, but with no more fat on him than a Pamplona bull. His brown eyes had the consistency of constipated turds behind his thick glasses. His jaw stuck out like a sledgehammer. Now he resumed speaking, his voice, as before, sounding like a cattle stampede over a gravel pit.
“No questions. Good. Now, this here is a get-acquainted meeting after which you guys can suit up, and we’ll have a scrimmage. I’ll have more to say before that, but first I’m gonna have the assistant coach call out your names to make sure you’re all here and to see what you look like.”
The assistant coach read off the names in a voice like the computer in 200122 . Each player responded by answering with his position—”Right guard,” “Center,” and so forth. Finally he reached the “O’s” on his list.
“Outlaw, Nuke,” he called metallically.
“Here. Right tackle.”
“Why are you yawning, Outlaw?” Coach Newtrokni demanded. “Are we boring you?”
“No, sir.” Nuke was sheepish. “I just didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“That’s no excuse, Outlaw. Too much sleep is bad for you. I don’t believe in sleep. I like my boys to keep active. You keep active, Outlaw, and you won’t be yawning when you shouldn’t.”
“Yes, Coach.” Nuke’s jaw muscles worked like tractor valves to suppress another yawn.
“Niemath, Terry.” The calling of names continued.
“Here,” Terry answered in her fluty feminine voice from behind Nuke Outlaw’s heft. “Quarterback.”