Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson

drunk. After it’s over I call the Shoney’s and Catman picks me up.
    —What did the rooster say to the screwdriver?
    —Not tonight, Catman.
    —Oh, all right, Nate. All right.
    The next day I become violently ill and shit and puke for twenty-four hours. I lose ten pounds and can’t go into rehab. I lie in my musty room festering like a wound in the heavy air of vomit and excrement and roll myself up into a sheet burrito and pray for the end of everything. I want the screen to go blank and end my misery once and for all. I sit on the toilet with a bucket in my hand, staring at my face in the full-length mirror hitched stupidly to the bathroom door. I don’t recognize myself. I’m a ghost, limping, bleeding, crawling after the sunset. Everything is wrong here. I’m dying. But turn around, boy. The sun also rises. Today makes unthinkable the thoughts of yesterday. The bug that squirmed in my body and tried to kill me was killed instead. I lick the blood from the blade and kick the corpse into a shallow grave as I step from my room at last.
    —God damn it, boy. You look like shit.
    M ayfield.
    —You should have seen me yesterday.
    —Couldn’t have been much worse than today! Go and get some food in you. We’ll get to your rehab later. You need to get your weight up before I can clear you.
    I spend the next three days in the HealthSouth cafeteria and the following day I’m on my way back to Germany. Mayfield has cleared me after a solid performance on the Biodex machine and a solid enough performance in the running portion of the evaluation. He tells me I better run like a scalded dog if I am going to get clearance. I do my best scalded-dog impersonation and all is right in the world. My knee isn’t really healed, but who cares? Nothing ever really heals. Not in football. Not in anything. I can deal with whatever not being 100 percent means but I can’t take another week in Birmingham. Things have gotten too heavy.
    I’m convinced that the Shoney’s is haunted. My dreams are so intense I wake up exhausted. My movie date grows hostile toward me because of I don’t know what. Catman asks me if I can buy him a Snickers. Then he asks if I can give him money for his bills. A few days later he gets fired. Then rehired. Fights are breaking out between injured players in the back of the shuttle on the way to dinner, in the lobby of the hotel, at HealthSouth. Everything is in shambles. And it is not going to get any better. The Shoney’s Inn is firmly planted in the Birmingham dirt and NFL Europe injured life descends upon it like a plague. Mayfield has given me my freedom just in time.
    I arrive back in Germany to a different hotel and a far less enthusiastic team. We are 2-3 and a week earlier, had left the Relexa Hotel because of a convention in town. We will stay at a hotel outside Düsseldorf in Hamm for another week, then back to the Relexa for the last three weeks of the season. At the airport in Alabama I pick up some magazines to keep me company through the no-doubt sleepless few nights I will endure upon my jet-lagged arrival in Germany.
    One is a Playboy . The cover girl is a Japanese woman named Hiromi. The liquid curve of her body, the obvious softness of her skin, her sweet smile and her raven hair: she jumps into the third dimension and sits down next to me and we watch late-night German television together for three nights. Late-night TV in Germany could be a naked woman holding a basketball and dancing next to a Cessna airplane, or a slapstick talk show, or three grown men wearing only socks and tennis shoes playing a two-on-one tennis match over house music. You never know.
    Hiromi and I laugh for hours until we finally doze off into the half-dream, half-hallucinatory vacuum trance that seizes the jetlagged world traveler upon arrival. The dripping of my bathroom faucet careens off the walls of a vibrant mental cave and twists the dial on an ever-expanding ghost hunt, soliciting the expertise of myriad