Playing for Pizza (Page 26)

The first was an establishment known as a discopub, a genuine Irish pub with a long happy hour followed by wall-to-wall dancing. They arrived around 2:00 a.m., and the pub was rocking with a screeching British punk band and hundreds of young men and women gyrating wildly with the music. They drained a few beers and approached a few ladies. The language thing was quite a barrier. The second was a pricier club with a ten-euro cover charge, but Paolo knew someone who knew someone else, and the cover was waived. They found a table on the second level and watched the band and dance floor below. A bottle of Danish vodka arrived, with four glasses of ice, and the evening took a different turn. Rick flashed a credit card and paid for the drinks. Sly and Trey were on tight budgets, as was Paolo, though he tried not to show it. Rick, the quarterback at twenty grand a year, was happy enough to play the big shot. Paolo disappeared and returned with three women, three very attractive Italian girls willing to at least say hello to the Americans. One spoke broken English, but after a few minutes of awkward chitchat they resorted to Italian with Paolo, and the Americans were gently pushed to the sidelines. "How do you pick up girls if they can’t speak English?" Rick asked Sly. "My wife speaks English." Then Trey led one of the girls away to the dance floor. "These European girls," Sly said, "always checking out the black dudes."

"Must be awful."

After an hour, the Italians moved on. The vodka was gone. The party began some time after 4:00 a.m. when they stepped into a packed Bavarian beer hall with a reggae band onstage. English was the dominant tongue–lots of American students and twentysomethings. On the way back from the bar with four steins of beer, Rick found himself cornered by a group of ladies from the South, according to their drawls.

"Dallas," one said. They were travel agents, all in their mid thirties and probably married, though no wedding rings were visible. Rick sat the beers on their table and offered them up. To hell with his teammates. There was no brotherhood. Within seconds he was dancing with Beverly, a slightly overweight redhead with beautiful skin, and when Beverly danced it was full contact. The floor was crowded, bodies bumped into bodies, and to keep close Beverly kept her hands on Rick. She hugged and hunched and groped, and between songs suggested they retire to a corner where they could be alone, away from her competition. She was a dinger, and a determined one. There was no sign of the other Panthers. But Rick guided her back to her table, where her fellow travel agents were assaulting all manner of men. He danced with one named Lisa from Houston whose ex-husband ran off with his law partner, and so on. She was a bore, and of the two he preferred Beverly. Paolo popped in to check on his quarterback, and with his accented English thrilled the ladies with an amazing string of lies. He and Rick were famous rugby players from Rome who traveled the world with their team, earning millions and living life in grand style. Rick rarely lied to pick up women; it simply wasn’t necessary. But it was humorous to watch the Italian work the crowd. Sly and Trey were gone, Paolo told Rick as he moved to another table. Left with two blondes who spoke the language, albeit with a funny accent. Probably Irish, he thought.

After the third dance, maybe the fourth, Beverly finally convinced him to leave, through a side door to avoid her friends. They walked a few blocks, completely lost, then found a cab. They groped for ten minutes in the backseat until it stopped at the Regency. Her room was on the fifth floor. As Rick pulled the curtains, he saw the first hint of dawn.

He managed to open one eye in the early afternoon, and with it he saw red toenails and realized Bev was still asleep. He closed it and drifted away. His head felt worse the second time he awoke. She was not in the bed but in the shower, and for a few minutes he thought about his escape. Though the disentanglement and clumsy good-bye would be over quickly, he still hated it. He always had. Was cheap sex really worth the lies on the run? "Hey, you were great, gotta go now."

"Sure, I’ll give you a call." How many times had he opened his eyes, tried to remember the girl’s name, tried to remember where he found her, tried to recall the details of the actual deed, the momentous occasion that got them into bed to begin with? The shower was running. His clothes were in a pile by the door. He suddenly felt older, not necessarily more mature, but certainly tired of the role of the bed-hopping bachelor with the golden arm. All the women had been throwaways, from the cute cheerleaders in college to this stranger in a foreign city.

The football-stud act was over. It ended in Cleveland with his last real game.

He thought of Gabriella, then tried not to. How odd that he felt guilty lying under thin sheets listening to the water run over the body of a woman whose last name he never heard. He quickly dressed and waited. The water stopped, and Bev walked out in a hotel bathrobe. "So you’re awake," she said with a forced smile. "Finally," he said, standing and anxious to get it over with. He hoped she didn’t stall and want drinks and dinner and another night of it. "I need to go."

"So long," she said, dien abruptly returned to the bathroom and shut the door. He heard the lock click. How wonderful. In the hallway, he decided that she was indeed married, and she probably felt a lot guiltier than he did. Over beer and pizza, the four amigos nursed their hangovers and compared stories. Rick, to his surprise, found such frat boy talk silly. "Ever hear of the forty-eight-hour rule?" he asked. And before anyone could answer, he said, "It’s pretty common in pro football. No booze forty-eight hours before kickoff."

"Kickoff is in about twenty hours," Trey said. "So much for that rule," Sly said, gulping his beer. "I say we take it easy tonight," Rick said. The other three nodded but did not commit. They found a half-empty discopub and threw darts for an hour as the place filled and a band tuned up in one corner. Suddenly the pub was flooded with German college students, most of them female and all of them ready for a hard night. The darts were forgotten when the dancing began. A lot of things were forgotten.

American football was less popular in Milan than in Parma. Someone said there were 100,000 Yanks living in Milan, and evidently most hated football. A couple hundred fans showed up for the kickoff.

The Rhinos’ home was an old soccer field with a few sections of bleachers. The team had labored for years in Series B before being promoted this season. They were no match for the mighty Panthers, which made it hard to explain their twenty-point lead at halftime. The first half was Sam’s worst nightmare. As he anticipated, the team was flat and lackadaisical, and no amount of screaming could motivate them. After four carries, Sly was on the sideline gasping and heaving. Franco fumbled the ball away on his first and only carry. His ace quarterback seemed a bit slow, and his passes were uncatchable. Two were batted around long enough for the Rhinos’ safety to grab them. Rick fumbled one handoff, and refused to run the ball. His feet felt like bricks. As they jogged off the field at halftime, Sam went after his quarterback. "You hungover?" he demanded, rather loudly, or at least loud enough for the rest of the team to hear. "How long you been in Milan? All weekend? You been drunk all weekend? You look like shit and you play like shit, you know that!"

"Thanks, Coach," Rick said, still jogging. Sam stayed beside him step for step, and the Italians got out of the way. "You’re supposed to be the leader, right?"

"Thanks, Coach."

"And you show up all red-eyed and hungover and you can’t hit a barn with a pass. You make me sick, you know that?"