The Moth

12

“The future of football, of pro football, is right here in the South. With outdoor night sports the coming thing, a whole new field has opened up and pro football will claim it. I mean to take advantage of what the South offers. I mean to cooperate with baseball. I mean to begin where baseball leaves off, beginning the week after the World Series this October, and by using the ball parks, put on night games, not once a week, but seven nights a week, with doubleheaders if we skip any. But that’s the beauty of football: there’ll be no need to skip. Football is the one sport that never called a game on account of weather, that never gave a rain check, hail check, or snow check. Whatever it’s doing topside, the game goes on. If the customers don’t mind, the players don’t care. But why would the customers mind? Here in the South it’s always warm enough, and in a covered stand it’s dry enough. Once more, the South will find out it’s got something.”

“You running the whole league?”

“I’m running one team, here in Atlanta.”

“But, Mr. Dillon, who’ll you play?”

“Chattanooga, Memphis, Houston, San Antonio, New Orleans, Jacksonville, and Miami.”

“You’ll go into the Southwest, too?”

“Why not? This is a pure matter of weather. Sure I’ll cross the river.”

“Are those teams ready?”

“They soon will be. While I’m promoting them and lining up backing — which is all in sight, my friends, I’m not out to sell stock — we’ll challenge existing teams, and the way I hear it, the boys on the big Eastern clubs have quite a little time on their hands, and for a nice guarantee, maybe they won’t be too proud to come down here and do their stuff for Georgia. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m offering dates to colleges. For a nice cut of the gate and the fastest practice they’ll ever get, you may find those campus coaches will take a liberal view of ethics, if, as, and when they’ve got any.”

It was maybe a week later, in the lobby of the Atlanta Biltmore. I had called the sporting editors, and they’d sent three or four reporters and some photographers over. And in hardly more than an hour there I was, all over the front pages, with big pictures of me, and big banner headlines telling how Atlanta was to have a team. Seeing it in print made it seem like in a week you’d hear the referee’s whistle. How much of it was real and how much was phony, just a stall to hide the spot I was in, I don’t know. I had driven on to Richmond and gone to bed in some little hotel there, then after I caught up on my sleep, gone on to Raleigh and Durham and I don’t know what other places. All that time I was trying to forget Helen, cut out the bitter way I was raging at the Old Man, and figure out where I was at and what I was going to do. In Durham, I guess it was, I snapped out of it enough to cruise around to get a little work. I went to garages, because at least I could talk car language and make the things go. Some of the owners just laughed at me, some of them got sore for taking up their time with an idea like that, and some of them gave me a serious talking to. They told me to go home, if I had one, because there was no work to do. It wasn’t news, but it showed what I was up against. I toted my money, what I had with me and what was in bank, and I had about two hundred dollars, which was what I had saved during the summer, after paying a couple of bills. And I had the car. I did a little more asking around, and then it came to me I better pull something, but quick. That was when I hit on this idea of organizing a pro league in the South, and as I write it up now, I don’t see such a whole lot wrong with it. I’ve done plenty of promoting since then, and it doesn’t look even a little bit silly. I might have got away with it, at that, if it hadn’t been for one of the reporters, a little guy named Harmon. The day after the press conference I was reading papers in the lobby when he crossed over and sat down. “I rang your room but you didn’t answer, then I saw you buy the papers. Thought I’d give you a chance to look ’em over before I came up with my proposition.”

“Which is?”

“Who’s back of this?”

“Why — me, among other people.”

“Just asking, shut my mouth if I’m out of order. If you’ve got all the backing you want, that lets me out. But — if it’s an open game — I might have a friend, Mr. Dillon, and — we’re all out to make a dollar, aren’t we? — I might have an angle.”

“No harm hearing it.”

His angle was to handle press stuff, public relations he called it, for my Atlanta club, and maybe later for the league. But his friend was what interested me. Because I give you one guess how much backing I had. I had put on a tall front, but beyond that I didn’t have any backing, and it was just this kind of break I had hoped to get. Looking back at it now I’m amazed I didn’t go with it straight to the baseball people, on the basis of winter shows for their park, and let them put up the jack while I worked on plays. But I was doing it all off the cuff, and with this bird caught it looked like I hadn’t done so bad. And when he began talking about his days on the Washington Star, and remembered stuff I’d pulled in the Georgetown games, and reminded me how two or three writers had picked me for all-American, I was plenty glad to listen to him, and let him take his time getting around to his friend. When he did he got mysterious. “You know a certain soft drink that’s manufactured here, Mr. Dillon?”

“Why not Jack?”

“And my name’s Harry — to my friends, Hank.”

“Yeah, Hank, I know the beverage.”

“My friend’s close to that pause that refreshes. About as close as you can get without glue. That gives you an idea the circles he moves in. But there’s a difference. That soft-drink dough, I’d never want it for a sporting proposition.”

“Dough is dough.”

“There’s certain things that soft-drink dough knows about, certain things that show dough knows about, and certain things that sporting dough knows about — things you got to do, stuff you’ve got to pay for, that looks plain crazy to other kinds of dough. Sporting dough knows, for instance, that you can’t promote football with some guy sent out by the chamber of commerce that’s a shark on debentures, futures, escrows, and stocks, but nothing else. For football, you need a guy that knows football, and right there, Jack, if you don’t mind my being a little personal, is where you’ve got inside position on anybody in this town that I know of. That’s why this dough I’m talking about is going to be impressed.”

“Who is this dough, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“If I told you all I know, where’d I be at with my angle? I love you, Jack, but this is business. In due time you’ll know everything there is to know, but until then leave it to me.”

“What time is due time?”

“That dough, right now, is on the yacht.”

“It got a yacht?”

“As I told you, it’s sporting dough. The yacht’s off Nassau now, sailfishing, but on a radio from me they’ll break in on it. Relax, that’s all. See our city. In a couple of days you’ll be hearing something. But I’ve got to know one thing.”

“I’ll tell you, if I can.”

“Are you playing on this team yourself?”

“I cracked a knee cap last fall.”

“You mean it’s out? Your playing days are over?”

“I mean if I could run a hundred yards in fifteen seconds now it would be a miracle. You’re not much good out there, you know, unless you can do it at least in eleven.”

“Shake, Jack. That makes me feel better than anything you’ve said yet. Because a player-manager is just a headache, as every sporting man knows. It’s O.K. to play, but if you’re playing, play. But if you’re going to run it, run it. Don’t be causing jealousy and friction and distrust just because you’ve got some idea you’re the only man that can score a point. Now I know it’s a natural. Now I can put in that radiogram what it’ll take to get action. You feel it yourself, don’t you?”

“If I didn’t I wouldn’t be here.”

“Right.”

That week, if I ever had any respect for newspapers I lost it. Once more, I can’t tell you how much I meant any of this, of whether I thought something would come of it, or if it was just one last shot in the arm before I’d have to wake up and come face to face with my life. But it seemed real, at the time, and of course by then I knew that on something of that kind, where promotion was it, you had to tear in with all you had, and put it in lights, with bugles blowing. I put out stuff so raw you wouldn’t think anybody would go for it. Capone was hot then. I put out stuff denying he was back of me, and saying I’d sue anybody that said he was, and they printed it. I put out stuff saying I meant to build a team that could play even with the best there was, I didn’t care if it was the Green Bay Packers or the Providence Steam Roller, and they printed it. I wired Red Baughman, that had played tackle with me in college, if he was free to work for me, and when he wired he was, I put out stuff saying the first player had been selected for Atlanta, and they printed it. I sent a dozen more wires, and when enough players had accepted, or anyway said they were free, I announced the “first eleven,” and they printed it. I put out stuff that the team would be the Remuda, and they printed it. Soon I decided to put out drinks for the reporters, and that meant a suite, as they wouldn’t serve it downstairs. The bellboy took nine dollars a bottle for the liquor, with fifty cents tip. Almost before I knew it the cash in my pocket was down to silver, and I had to eat chili till my check cleared for a hundred dollars.

All sorts of people were calling me by then: real-estate men, trying to sell me anything from a farm, to make a park out of, to a house to live in; insurance men, to write coverage for the team, on some kind of group plan; sporting-goods salesmen, to quote prices on uniforms; concession men, to talk about soft drinks, hot dogs, and programs; and forty guys wanting jobs, anything from usher to cutting grass. I stalled them all off, but soon I made use of them, anyway to look big. I’d sit around the lobby, on purpose not near a phone, and of course when the girl couldn’t get me she’d have me paged. It got so that “Mr. Jack Dillon, of the Atlanta Remuda,” was going off every minute and a half. It cost a dime a throw for the bellboys, but I figured it was worth it. Hank called me three, four, and five times a day, and when he wasn’t calling me he was dropping around. Then one night the phone rang, and he was on the line. “Well, Jack, what did I tell you? Boy, are you going to feel good. O.K., here goes, word for word — it’s addressed to me here at the paper and it says:

Is that saying it, Jack? Ain’t that one swell guy and don’t it make you feel good?”

“It’s just great.”

“I told you, hold everything.”

“I’m playing it just like you say.”

Within the next three days there were four more wires, each one better than the last. But when I found out the engine was a tug job into Nassau, I began to get worried, because my money was going fast. One night when he called I said: “Hank, I got an idea that makes sense.”

“Boy, let’s hear it.”

“While he’s getting his boat in shape, why don’t I jump in the car and take a swing around to Memphis and New Orleans and as many places as I can before he gets back? Then when he comes in I’ve got something to tell him. I’ll keep in touch, and—”

“That’s it! That’s it!”

“I’ll line it up, and then—”

“It’s ready.”

I don’t think I said one thing to Hank the whole time that was going on that he didn’t say it was great, and I guess I was beginning to notice it, that he was what you might call unusually optimistic. But, as I’m telling you, I’m not sure any of it was more than a jumbo stall. Nothing about it seemed real, from all those zanies trying to sell me stuff, and kidding themselves as much as I was kidding them, to those players wiring they were free and would be proud and happy to play under me as manager, and kidding themselves there’d be something on the fire pretty soon. But the main thing now was, I had to get out of that hotel, and at the same time I had to make it look like I was only temporarily gone, and would be back as soon as I got other stuff out of the way that was important. I packed what I’d need in one bag, left the other at the check room, and checked out. I went to a little dump on the north end of town, with some name like the Rosemary Cottage, that charged a dollar a night and wanted it in advance, and took a room. Then I began cruising around Georgia, going to every town there was: Augusta, Athens, Rome, Milledgeville, Decatur, just to name a few, looking for work. I went to every garage there was, and everywhere was the same answer: if they could, they would, and glad to do it; but every one of them had laid men off, and if there was any hiring to be done, the laid-off men had to come back. Then I began going to hotels. I don’t like the hotel business, and I hated anything that might mean a query to the Cartaret. But anything for a job. It got me nowhere. One man, at the Dixie Hunt in Gainesville, it could have been, explained to me: “Brother, I hear what you say, that you’ll do whatever I’ve got for room and meals and space for your car. The trouble is, there’s been just about three hundred guys ahead of you with exactly that proposition, and some of them are friends. I mean it’s personal. You don’t know what this thing is, or you wouldn’t even be in here. It’s just about the worst that ever hit the country, and if you’re up against it, don’t let it worry you. Everybody else is, bad.”

This, as well as I remember, was toward the end of September, maybe early in October. I was wearing my overcoat, which surprised me, as I thought in Dixie you wore shirt sleeves all the time. Anyhow, whenever it was, a political campaign was going on, or it seems it must have been. It says in the history books that in 1932 we elected a president, but if we did I don’t remember anything about it. That’s something I’d like to get straight. Later, when relief came in and all that kind of stuff, politics got to be everybody’s business. But in 1932 there was such a thing as being so jammed up with your own grief it didn’t mean a thing to you. The band played and the band stopped, and we elected Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt instead of Mr. Herbert Hoover, but down where I lived, what we heard about it was nothing whatever.

“Oh it’s you, Jack.”

“Hank, what do you know?”

“Got news at last, some of it good, some — not so hot.”

“Let’s hear it anyway.”

“Another radiogram, sent me here at the paper, same as usual:

Don’t that beat all hell, Jack?”

“Kind of louses it up.”

“Gwendolyn’s his daughter. Spoiled, bull-headed kid, all she thinks about is riding horses and getting her picture taken with some kind of a duke. What could he do?”

“Then — better luck next time.”

“Knocks it in the head for this season all right. But for next year, maybe it’s even better, as it gives us more time. You know what I mean, Jack? This way, we’ll have our feet on the ground and can do it right.”

“Right.”

“You’ll buzz me on it? First of the year.”

“Right.”

“I’ll be looking for you.”

“Right.”

Around November 1 I sold the car. It was a 1928 Buick, with only 80,000 miles on it. But the book said $170, and that’s what I had to take. I moved out of the Rosemary into a place out on Marietta Street that didn’t have any name. It was run by a Mrs. Pickens, and I took a back room, third floor, bath on the second floor, at $3.50 a week. Meals I ate in a drugstore. Ham on white, with mustard, mostly, and coffee. I got expenses down to $1.50 a day, and figured that with the $160 or so I had left from the sale of the car I might last till spring, with a little luck, and by then things might be different. But before Christmas it was gone.

“Two fifty.”

“My God, the suit cost forty bucks!”

“Two fifty.”

“Look, stop being funny. The suit cost forty, like I told you, less than six months ago, it’s hardly been worn at all — now make me an offer.”

“Two fifty.”

I handed it over and he gave me my ticket. It had been wrapped in paper because at Mrs. Pickens’s I was a week behind in my rent and both my suitcases had disappeared. So one by one I had taken both suits, the good suits I mean, the ones I could hock, and carried them out as bundles. The first one I took to a second-hand place, and they gave me $2.25. It made me sore, but I had to eat. The next one, two days later, I took to this hockshop and did two bits better. And still I looked for work, and still there was nothing to do. Then one day, when another week’s rent was due, I let myself in with my key, late, so I wouldn’t run into anybody, and tiptoed upstairs. The door to my room was locked.

“Mister, can you direct me to Terminal Station?”

“Keep right on down this street here till you come to the taxis all bunched at the curb, and that’s it. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you, sir... And could you give me a lift on a ticket to Meriwether? You see, I come from there, and I’ve got the offer of a job, if I can only—”

Some of them cussed me out for playing them a trick, asking my way to the station when I really meant to mooch, some of them gave me a dime, one gave me a nickel, and one gave me a quarter. This last guy looked pretty sore, and as he felt around in his pocket I wondered what I was going to do if he changed his mind and gave me a poke in the jaw. But all of a sudden, as he kept glaring at me, a bus stopped a few feet away, and who should get off it but Hank. I felt my blood turn to water. After all the big talk I had handed out to him, to be caught here on the street, with my hand out like a beggar, was more than I could stand. He didn’t see me. I turned and ran. I never wanted a touchdown as bad as I wanted a good, big, deep hole in the ground that day.

I didn’t decide to leave town, or have some reason that made sense, or figure an angle that would take me to some other place — I mean, if you’ve wondered why guys on the road move from one place to some other place, or why they think being hungry in Jacksonville is better than being hungry in Atlanta. I lammed out of Atlanta for the same reason I lammed out of a thousand places: I was just washed up there, that’s all. Harmon was one guy. There were two hundred and fifty others, guys I’d try to fool, guys it would make my face turn red to meet face to face, guys that had told me to scram, bum, scram, guys that had something on me, so I couldn’t take it any more, and had to have a fresh slate that might be bad, but not this bad. So instead of deciding anything I just kept on going. I couldn’t run very far, because by now I was getting a little weak. I had spent my last buck for a flop the night before and something to eat at a joint. Then, with everything I owned on my back or in my pockets, I had started out to bum a feed. That phony opening I didn’t think up particularly. At first I just put it on the line: “Mister, I hate to bother you, but could you—” And that was all. By then they’d be gone. I had to get them to stop, somehow. I thought asking my way to the station would do it. I kept at it all day, downtown and on side streets, but not on any good street. I don’t know why you hate it, that a guy with good clothes on might give you a snooty look, but you do.

I guess I was heading for New Orleans, and every time I’d hear something back of me I’d throw up my thumb. Nothing stopped. Then I saw some guys standing across the Southern yards like they were waiting for something. Then a string of gonds went past them, and banged into some flats. Then the engine would unhook and go down the yards, and I tumbled to what was going on. A freight was making up and these guys were waiting for it. I thought, me too. If that’s how you go, that’s how you go, and I should be here on the highway wasting my time on cars. It was, I would say, about five o’clock in the afternoon, just coming on dark with lights showing everywhere and fog hanging over. I went down in the ditch and up the other side and began crossing tracks. The guys looked up, and it was too far off to see them well, but the way they stared said there was something funny about it.

From down the yard I could see a light moving, and I guess I knew it was an engine, but as I said it was foggy, and you couldn’t see anything clear. Anyway it was over on the other side of the yards and didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. Then came a clanking, like a bunch of steel rods dumped down on concrete all at once. I mean it went clank-clank-clank-clank-clank. Then something hit me in the eyes, a glare that blinded me so I couldn’t tell where I was. I knew then I’d heard switches clanking from an electric control, so the crossovers made a diagonal line across the yards, and that the engine was coming right at me. I staggered back the way I had come, but it went through my mind I might as well stay put. There was no way to tell which track the thing had been switched to, and I could be racing right into it. I crouched down between tracks and waited. It got bigger and bigger in the fog, until it was right on top of me. Then it went by on the next track, a mile high, its firebox breathing hot on me.