ABSTRACT
I USED TO LIKE the Dallas Cowboys. Steel gray helmets, good luck gray, bad luck blue, skin tight, muscle definitioned thighs. I’d prepare for Sunday’s game, beer and my pillows at the ready. Rushing to the kitchen between commercials, burning the chicken or the boiled potatoes, depending on whether there was money, or making split pea soup, scraping up the last grain of garlic and the onions growing stems in the dark corners of the cupboard below the sink. I’d neglect the dishes from the night before or the week before, depending on the week, set up a phone line with Tony or Jo as the case may be, put the bottles of beer in the freezer, if I had beer, and wait for the game, sit through the pre-game or the highlights, have a fifteen minute nap, time permitting. This was after I’d just risen from an eight hour sleep, most of which was devoted to regenerating the body after dancing and drinking till four in the morning. Whatever liquor wasn’t danced out had to be slept out. Naturally sometimes even sleep would not produce the miracle of waking up without a vicious headache and feeling waterlogged, but I had prepared for this by putting the television near to my arm.
