Thirty-Two

“WHEN WAS THE LAST time you played in an actual game?” I said to Billy McGee, who’d been the bad boy of professional football when he was still allowed to play professional football and before he really did do six months of prison time.

He smirked. After only ten minutes, it already seemed like his default look. Or attitude. Or both. Somehow he seemed to be slouching even when he wasn’t.

“Blackjack or football?”

“Come on, Money,” Ryan said.

It had been Billy McGee’s nickname from the time he’d scored his first college touchdown, off a thirty-yard scramble, as a freshman at Arizona State. He’d pulled up his jersey when he was in the end zone that day and shown off the tattoo of a dollar sign on his chest, right under his shoulder pads.

He won the Heisman Trophy that year, came out of college two years later as the number one pick in the entire NFL draft, for the Lions. He was rookie of the year, got the Lions to the NFC championship game in his second season. After that it seemed that football was a sideline for him—that his full-time job was drinking and drugging and partying and casino hopping in Vegas every chance he got. And crashing cars. One columnist wrote that he’d had more wrecks than NASCAR. And he got into an endless series of fights in clubs. But two major events finally put him out of the league.

The single-car wreck of his Porsche on the Pacific Coast Highway was an accident—if not the fault of the liquor, pain pills, and Ambien in his system.

Within six months, he entered his former agent’s living room, accused him of stealing millions of dollars from him, pulled a gun, and threatened to shoot him. The whole thing was streamed live on YouTube.

That incident, two years ago, had earned him his prison time.

“You guys count the Canadian league as me playing?” McGee said. “I wasn’t there long, but if you count that, the last real game I played was a year and a half ago. That was before they found the ‘drug paraphernalia’ in my glove compartment after they pulled me over for nothing.”

He put air quotes around “drug paraphernalia.”

“For going twice the speed limit on a stretch of road outside Montreal,” Ryan said. “Hundred and forty kilometers, as I recall.”

Money McGee smirked again.

“Whatever.”

I had sent a plane to pick him up in Las Vegas, not wanting anybody to see him walking through the concourse at SFO, then had a car pick him up at the private field in Hayward. Now Billy “Money” McGee and Ryan and me were in my living room. McGee wore a Nas T-shirt, Mohawk haircut, earrings. He also had a small dollar sign, another one, tattooed underneath his left ear. Somehow he was still only twenty-six years old. Everything about his physical self reminded me of Eminem.

“Was appreciating Canada before all that,” he said. “Wide-open game, everybody in motion at once. Dudes, it was like being in a video game. Dope place to live, Montreal.” He grinned. “No pun intended, right? The dope part?”

Ryan sighed. “We get it.”

“Then I get into one beef with the cops, and they haul off and cut me.”

Ryan said, “The whole league cut you, Money. It was like the whole country cut you.”

“Plus, there was another positive drug test,” I said.

“How many times I got to say I thought it was a supplement?”

“Pretty sure it’s what they all say,” I said.

“Hey, lady. You called me.”

“Okay, let’s cut through all the bull,” Ryan said, “if that’s all right with you. If we give you a legit shot, which I guarantee you will be the last shot anybody is going to give you, do we have any reasonable expectation that you can behave yourself?”

The smirk again.

“Says the dude who punched out the other dude.”

I said, “Says the dude who might have thrown away a hundred million dollars or so.”

“What do you want to hear from me?” he said, slouching so much into my couch I thought he might slip down to the floor and end up under the coffee table.

“That you’re still a football player,” I said. “That you might be willing to stop throwing your talent away.”

“That you’re ready to be a quarterback and not a punch line,” Ryan said.

“I don’t have to listen to this shit,” he said.

I smiled.

“Sure you do.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you’ve been famous since high school, and you were on your way to being great in the pros before you turned into a career slob,” I said, “and an all-around punk-ass bitch.”

He came out of his slouch then and off the couch, on fire.

“I want to play!” he said. “Okay? I…want…to…play.”

We all let that settle.

Billy McGee realized he was standing and sat back down.

But now everybody in the room seemed to have everybody else’s attention.

“We’d be drug-testing you every other day,” Ryan said. “Minimum. That would be just one of the rules of the road. Along with the league testing you whenever it damn well pleases.”

“Test away,” McGee said. “I’ve been clean for six months.” He shrugged. “My wife got me into a program. Did the full twenty-eight. Now I go to a meeting a day.”

It was all there in the reading I’d done on him. His wife, Amanda, who’d been his college sweetheart, had gotten him to go to Betty Ford, in Rancho Mirage. Somehow, through it all, she had stayed with him. Having now been in his presence for an hour, I thought it seemed like a love that passed all understanding. But they really were still together. And here we all were.

“You know we’d be taking all the risk here,” Ryan said.

Billy McGee looked at him and in a quiet voice said, “Dude, I don’t just want to play. I need to play.”

Bad-boy pose completely gone, at least for the moment.

“Well, then,” I said. “Let’s see what you got.”

My bag was on a table inside the front door. I walked over to it, threw my phone inside, took out my car keys, opened my front door, made a motion for him to come along.

“We going somewhere?” Money McGee said.

“We are.”

“And where’s that?”

“High school.”