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

dust mites and molecular sponge-bath vermin to make my case before a stubborn queen. I’ve traveled all this way, my lady, to bring you this: I reach into my rucksack and pull from it a single violet stone: an amethyst. It twists in my fingers and catches the light just as—Bzzzzzzzzz. Alarm clock. The buzzing is in German and the queen has vanished. Hiromi is gone, too. It’s time to go to work.
    I arrive in the middle of the week. Most of my teammates have already fallen out of love with Germany, and the fact that we have a losing record makes it easy to start counting down the days until it’s all over. I try to keep things in perspective for them by explaining the situation in Birmingham. I do the catcall and everything.
    During a break from meetings the day before our game, Greg tells me there is some tension on the team after a recent incident at the hotel. There is a group of defensive players who played dominoes every night in the common area of our floor at the Relexa. Greg’s room opened up to that common area and every night, according to Greg, they slapped the dominoes down with gusto and laughed loud and made such a commotion that Greg was having a hard time sleeping. In fact, said Greg, he wasn’t sleeping at all. The rhythmic slapping of dominoes and laughter brought him to a boil. And repeated respectful pajama’d pleas to please quiet down and please just put the domino down instead of slamming it down because try try try as I have I cannot sleep when you guys are playing this loudly. It all went unheeded.
    Then Greg’s girlfriend, Alissa, came to town. It’s one thing to deal with hell privately, but when your woman comes around and makes you feel like a punk for letting it happen, something has to be done. As they lay quietly in the dark, taunted by the clacking ivory, Alissa incited a riot.
    —Say something, Greg.
    —Believe me I have. They don’t care.
    —Can’t you tell your coach?
    —I’m not going to run and tell Coach.
    —Well. You have to do something.
    —What do you want me to do? I have to live with them.
    —If you won’t do something, I will.
    After dinner the next night, like every other night, the domino crew took their places, washed the bones, and plucked their seven apiece. Only it was three sevens and a six. One bone was missing. The whole skeleton was useless. Thus ensued the world’s most frantic Easter egg hunt. It’s the small things in Düsseldorf that allow men to Be Flexible without Going Postal. Abdual, the ringleader of the domino squad, soon came around to the idea that the game was sabotaged. And it didn’t take long to come up with a prime suspect: the white guy in room 207.
    —Yo, man, you know what happened to our domino?
    —Huh? Domino? What do you mean?
    —You know what I mean, Greg. Someone took one of our dominoes.
    —No. No idea. Are you sure you didn’t lose it?
    —Naw, man, someone took it. You sure it wasn’t you?
    —I wouldn’t do that, man. C’mon!
    Propelled by the scent of Caucasian deceit, Abdual convinced the Relexa manager to let him review the security tapes.
    Domino, mothafucka!
    Sweet little Alissa, wearing a hooded jumpsuit, tiptoed into the hallway, glanced left and right as if crossing a dangerous street, stepped to the gaming table, and plucked the double five. She curled it in her fist and slid back into Greg’s room. But the eye in the sky does not lie. Armed with the visual evidence, Abdual returned to Greg’s room.
    —All right, Greg, we checked the tape and we know you have it. We want it back.
    —Yes, I have it and I’m not giving it to you.
    —Dawg, you stole it. Coach is going to send you home for this shit.
    —You’ve been stealing my sleep, dawg. Coach is sending you home!
    Back and forth they went until eventually cooler heads prevailed. Greg returned the domino and Abdual promised to try to tone it down. But they are still in the trial run portion of the tone-it-down phase, and things are still