The Whore Of Akron Part 9

This is an excellent plan. The only problem with this plan is that I don't feel like taking the Valium and going straight to bed. I'll wait until the Valium kicks in, which shouldn't be long on an empty stomach.

It's an amusing thought, an empty stomach. Somewhere inside this ma.s.sive sagging gut is the much smaller pouch of my actual stomach. Where's the Valium? Ah, it's still in the front pocket of my briefcase, in a little brown prescription bottle with the Vicodin.

Huh. Could be that this isn't such a good plan after all. Because with the little brown bottle in my hand, I no longer want just the Valium any more than I wanted just one sandwich. Let me rethink the plan.

It takes no more time to rethink the plan than it does to pour a gla.s.s of water in the kitchen and bolt the Valium and the Vicodin. The chatter inside the refrigerator has stopped. The dog looks at me. Smartest dog I've ever known. f.u.c.ker's smiling.

Who's the big puppy?

That get his tail going, all right. Besides, who the f.u.c.k is he going to tell. Smart as he is, he's still a dog.

"And you're still an addict," he says.

Actually, I say it for him.

I sit in the rocker, open the laptop, and sign on to Twitter.

First thing I see is a tweet from @KingJames: "I love my chef B so much(pause)! He made the meanest/best peach cobbler I've ever had in life. Wow!!"

James attaches a photo of the cobbler, which looks fabulous: two huge rough-cut hunks, gold-crusted and gleaming, with a couple of slabs of vanilla ice cream on top.

It's 2:30 a.m., and he has a game tomorrow night-tonight-against the Utah Jazz, and he's scarfing cobbler and tweeting about it like he's ten years old.

Can I hate the sinner and love the sin? I do.

"Note to self: Cobbler hard to hate," I tweet.

A minute later, "ESPN ramps up Cobbler Index," followed immediately by a third tweet: "Broussard sez @KingJames having pineapple upside-down cake tom'w. Bucher doing recipe book. Wilbon to query chef. J Gray wiping Bron's a.s.s."

By this time, the dog is laughing. By this time, I can taste the f.u.c.king cobbler. Oh, I could really use that sandwich. If only I could figure out how to get out of the chair. This slow rush of narcotic joy is a dear old friend who needs no invite to make himself at home. Mi casa es, motherf.u.c.ker.

Reminds me: I'm overdue for my next colonoscopy, for those too-few seconds between the anesthesiologist unloosing the fentanyl-and-Versed c.o.c.ktail and unconsciousness. Next time, I'll have peach cobbler after I wake up. Maybe they can find a way to get some cobbler into the IV tube?

The room spins and goes dark, but only for a second. When I lift my head off my chest, I see James's tweet, each letter of it throbbing.

What the h.e.l.l does "(pause)" mean?

"You tell me," the dog says, tilting his head toward the recliner on the other side of the fireplace where my father sits reading the paper. He's in his thirties, back when he was my father, with a white T-shirt tight over his biceps and a short cigar stinking cheap.

When I was five or six years old, he sat on the front patio of our house behind a newspaper while I caught with my face the flying fists of d.i.c.kie Schwartz, the bully of the block. Sat there while I fought to keep my feet at the bottom of the driveway.

Ign.o.ble p.r.i.c.k.

"I was trying to teach you an important lesson: in this world, you have to fight your own battles."

You taught me something more important than that: expect to be abandoned by those you love when you need them most-just like Willie taught you.

Sandy raises the paper back in front of his face. The old Cleveland Press. The dog is gone. LeBron is sitting on the couch and he has a dish of cobbler for me.

"Is that what you're going to teach your boy?" LeBron asks. "You're killing yourself with a fork and spoon."

Jesus, this cobbler's beastly good.

"Haaaaa."

He's dressed like Urkel. I saw you in this outfit-a cardigan over a plaid shirt, big black-framed gla.s.ses-at Madison Square Garden a year ago almost to the day.

"I scored thirty-three."

So young. Young enough to be my son.

"I was a father when I was eighteen," he says.

When I was your age, I took my talents to Austin, Texas. Tended bar and drank around the clock. Smoked weed coated with angel dust and dropped bad acid. Managed a 24-unit apartment complex with the girl I left Cleveland with-a sweet young Catholic poet from Garfield Heights.

"Why would you write about my c.o.c.k? What's wrong with you?"

I don't know, kid. I thought you were staying in Cleveland when I saw your d.i.c.k. You f.u.c.ked up-you quit. You lied. You left.

"What does any of that have to do with my c.o.c.k?"

Nothing. Not a thing. It just seemed funny, almost falling over the towel thing, looking over, boom.

"You should've stayed in Texas, man. Maybe you'd have grown up."

I had to leave. I rented an apartment to a woman whose boyfriend was an outlaw biker. She worked at a ma.s.sage parlor. Austin was full of ma.s.sage parlors full of young women turning tricks. Rotten Rod-her boyfriend-was essentially a pimp.

"Rotten Rod?"

That was his outlaw sobriquet. I just called him Rod. We smoked the PCP. We played chess. As you might guess, his game was a tad aggressive. But he was good. His own father-a biker too-had taught him to play at an early age. He talked about his dad a lot. But it wasn't real friendship-he had no one else to talk to except Crazy John, and even before John got run over and killed on East Lamar, he was generally too f.u.c.ked up to keep a conversation going. Not long after John pa.s.sed-under the wheels of a semi-Rod suggested that I put my girl to work at the ma.s.sage parlor, and I found myself at a loss. Could I say that I wasn't the kind of skunk who'd do that? He was trying to be helpful; he knew we didn't have much money. And I think he was looking for a partner.

"What'd you tell him?"

I told him she would never do it.

"What'd he say?"

He said, "If she loved you, she would." He said, "She wouldn't have to touch no Meskins or n.i.g.g.e.rs." Something like that.

"What'd you say?"

I can't recall.

"You can't recall."

Man, this cobbler's tasty.

"You were scared."

Oh, you have no idea how scared. I was selling weed by the pound, to outlaw bikers. Not a good plan. They always paid, until they didn't. "My girl got crabs and had a lousy week"; "I had to spring for another rebuilt carburetor"; "I've got a road trip coming up." I couldn't collect. I had no leverage, no muscle. I knew it. They knew it. I couldn't pay my guy. I had to leave town quick. Not like you. n.o.body gave a d.a.m.n where I was except for the folks I owed money.

"That girl from Garfield Heights?"

Gone. I can't even recall why. I remember her little sister died in a car accident back in Cleveland. Maybe she left then. Maybe things fell apart before that. I was too f.u.c.ked up to notice.

"How dare you judge me?"

You spit on millions of people.

"I don't answer to them. I do what's right for LeBron."

Is that what you'd tell a West Akron kid who cried when you left the Cavs?

"I spit on n.o.body. I played my a.s.s off for seven years. Those kids never once heard of me with drugs or guns or any of that stuff. Not once. Those were the best years that team ever had, and you judge me for leaving like it's the worst crime ever committed."

I can't think of a parallel betrayal in the history of American sports.

"What's the worst thing you ever did?"

Summer of 1994. I got the woman I love pregnant. She was afraid to have the kid. I wanted the kid-I was forty-two years old, I'd destroyed everything in my life, including my marriage. I still wanted that kid. All she wanted in return was the promise that I'd sober up. Just the promise.

"What happened?"

I couldn't do it.

"What happened?"

She had the abortion. I drove her to the hospital myself. Drove her there, drove her home, went back to my place, got f.u.c.ked up, got out my shotgun, and put it in my mouth.

"What happened?"

I couldn't do that, either.

"You crying?"

It's the cobbler, LeBron. It's the meanest/best cobbler I've ever had.

Chapter Eleven.

Little Access for a Big Man I never did kill myself. I didn't want the dog to eat me.

Barely has the plane to Miami taken off-half a minute, tops-when the dinging and the chiming begin.

"Way too soon," I say to the woman next to me. She's reading a book in Hebrew, which I had found rea.s.suring before we took off. I don't know why that felt rea.s.suring; I think it had something to do with being in first cla.s.s. I'm in front of the little curtain for the first time in many years, having used my carefully h.o.a.rded One Pa.s.s miles. All is right in the world. Better than all right: I am special, and so is my life. A fellow Jew? Flying out of Newark, of all places? To Miami yet? Quelle phenomenon!

"What?" says the woman. "Too what?" Her accent is Israeli.

Too soon, I say. The dinging. The chiming. The bells. Something's wrong.

The captain gets on the PA to tell us that one of the crew has reported smelling "an electrical odor" in the back of the plane. Captain Landry says he is going to "vector" us back to Newark. I'm grateful he called us "folks" and gave us his name. Vector away.

The Israeli woman is on her cell phone. She's speaking Hebrew-Greek to me. Finished, she tells me that her husband's a pilot and he says our plane is on fire.

"El Al?" I ask.

No. He flies an F-15 in the Israeli air force. "What will happen?" she asks me. A worried Jew-imagine such a thing.

We'll be fine, I tell her. You're sitting next to me. And I am on a mission from G.o.d.

She laughs.

How calm I feel. No more Vicodin, no more Valium; I have flushed the pills down the c.r.a.pper after my peach cobbler vision quest. I can't even credit first cla.s.s for the depth of my serenity. I feel ready to face the fact of death. G.o.d I trust no further than I can heave my washing machine, but the Heat are struggling, and I have a son. I am complete.

Also I can tell from his voice alone that our Captain Landry is an ace, a major sheygetz. I see fire trucks racing along the tarmac as we land, but there is no fire. We debark in the usual manner, to cool our heels in the terminal while they fetch another plane.

I call home to tell Lisa I love her, and ask her to put the boy on the phone so I can tell him I love him, too.

Have I mentioned his name? I don't like to mention his name for the same reason that I find myself-it is a reflex, involuntary-saying kinehora each time I refer to him, just as my grandmother did when I was a child. No evil eye shall befall him.

People-stupid people-ask me if he's smart. Not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, I say. Never brag on a child. Don't a.s.sume or announce anything good. G.o.d or the Cossacks will get here shortly. Either way, the innocent and defenseless will be set aflame. The real suffering is always yet to come.

His name is Thomas Judah Brennan Raab. No hyphens. I hate when people hyphenate their progeny, as if two car dealerships had merged. I thought of maybe putting in a semicolon: Thomas Judah; Brennan Raab. Thomas Brennan was my wife's father's name; he died before I met Lisa. I wanted Judah in honor of Judah Maccabee, a Jewish farmer-warrior whose Old Testament prowess led to the recapture of the temple and to Hanukkah.

Judah is his name. Fruit of my loins. Light of my life. My kaddish, whose first full sentence was, "f.u.c.k Derek Jeter." Perhaps not his first. But close.

The mood in Heatville is dark when I arrive, and the mavens who called the team a threat to win 65 or 70 games before they ever played a single one have gone silent. Three nights ago, Miami blew a 22-point lead at home against the Utah Jazz and lost in overtime, 116114. LeBron posted a triple-double, but he shot 518 and failed to score a single point in overtime.

After the loss, Wade admitted that the Heat might have panicked, while James noted that Utah coach Jerry Sloan had Erik Spoelstra's plays figured out before the Heat ran them. Two nights later, James scored 35 points and missed a triple-double by one a.s.sist as the Heat lost at home to the Celtics, 112107. Late in the game, LeBron clanked two free throws and a layup, then complained afterward that he and Wade had played too many minutes.

"For myself, 44 minutes is too much. I think Coach Spo knows that. Forty minutes for D-Wade is too much. We have to have as much energy as we can to finish games out."

The Heat are 54, and for all his talk of "getting to know each other," Coach Spo must already feel the cold edge of the dagger at his back. I can't think of another situation in any pro sport where a star free agent has joined a new team and begun the season by publicly criticizing his new head coach.

I've arrived in time to catch Sat.u.r.day night's game against the hapless Raptors. I have beleaguered both Tims-Frank at NBA media relations and Donovan at the Heat-with e-mails detailing my plan to cover the final three games of this home stand and file a daily report on Esquire.com, and an Esquire editor has sent both Tims confirmation of my a.s.signment, which conforms to their putative requirements for a media credential.

Tim Donovan's hand is forced, but only so far. He grants me a credential for tonight's game with Toronto. "We will let you know [about the rest of the week]," Tim says, after he "see[s] what [I am] reporting."

I can report that the Heat fashionistas are having trouble finding the arena, and those who have do not wish to Fan Up! I see thousands of empty seats at the Raptors game, and the actual attendees, even in the lumpenprole upper bowl above which Tim Donovan has thoughtfully found a spot for me, do not fulfill the exhortations of the PA announcer, an unblinking toad who seems to have been left behind by the same alien craft that brought Chris Bosh to earth.

The second half of the game is like the first. The Raptors make a couple of runs, but lack the sort of conviction that a team with more talent might display. The Raptors clearly prefer losing with quiet dignity this evening to wasting energy on a cause lost before the opening tip.