American Outlaw - Jesse James [35]
Nothing much ever came of us; I think she figured out pretty soon that I was fresh out of high school, and that kind of killed it. But damn, the motorcycle had sure opened the door for me. Of that, I took careful notice.
At the end of the summer, I received a battered cardboard package in the mail. I sat down on my front steps and ripped it open with my hands. It was my diploma. Well, how about that? I thought, laughing. They’d pushed me down, but they hadn’t beaten me yet. Life could have been a lot worse.
After all, I could have been Bobby. He called me one night, out of his mind with worry.
“What should I do, man?” he asked, tense. “My girl . . . she’s pregnant.”
I shrugged. Bobby and I had never really been the same after the CYA. He’d apologized, of course, and I’d accepted it, but I was still pretty touchy about serving his sentence for him.
“That’s up to you,” I said finally. “I can’t help you make that decision.”
He sighed. “I have the strangest feeling that I’m about to do the honorable thing.”
He did. At the age of eighteen, Bobby married his girlfriend. They found a place to live and set out to raise their child together. You had to respect him. He’d stepped up.
And me? Well, I was headed to community college. The Division One schools might have withdrawn their scholarship offers, but that sure as hell didn’t mean I was never getting on a football field again.
“Jesse,” Coach Pfieffer said, “you do a strong couple of seasons on one of these teams, and we’ll have Kansas banging on the door again, I promise. And this time when they come, you’ll be ready.”
I nodded, not fully convinced. “I’ll do my best.”
Luckily for me, a strong junior college was right around the corner: Riverside Community College. Like all junior colleges, they were a bit more forgiving when it came to tolerating players’ various idiosyncrasies, like having committed multiple burglaries. They needed a linebacker, and with Coach Pfieffer’s help, a scholarship had been set aside with my name on it.
“I made my decision,” I told my dad one afternoon, as he was restoring an oak dining set for the coming weekend’s swap meet. “I’m heading to RCC.”
My dad didn’t look up from his lacquering. His small brush moved steadily and with confidence. “That’s good.”
I watched him work for a while, my hands stuffed into my pants pockets.
“So, I guess I won’t be seeing you for a while.”
Patiently, my father continued to apply lacquer to the chair’s thin, ornate spindles.
“Any thoughts?” I asked impatiently.
“You got a place to live?” he said, finally.
“I’ll be in the dorms.”
“We can’t afford that.”
“You don’t have to pay a dime,” I said. “I’m on scholarship.”
“Oh. Okay.” My dad glanced up at me briefly, his paintbrush held between his index finger and thumb. He appeared lost in thought. “Well, stop by when you can.”
“Right,” I said. After a long silence, I added, “Thanks.”
——
On our first day of football practice, our new team assembled in a small locker room, unconsciously segregating ourselves according to ethnicity. The black kids, most of whom came from Compton High and South Central L.A., sat sullenly on one side of the room, staring down the beefy, working-class white knuckleheads who’d gathered together on the other side. In between us sat the Mexicans, the Samoans, and the Tongans in one big group. Instead of a football team, we looked like three gangs getting ready to rumble.
The assistant coach squinted at his clipboard, his chewed-up yellow pencil poised over the roster.
“Jackson, Anton?”
A thin, muscular black kid raised his hand. He wore cornrows and baggy jeans. His eyes emanated a quiet hate. I recognized him immediately from the California Youth Authority. He hadn’t been a friend, exactly.
“James, Jesse?”
I raised my hand. “Right here.”
Anton Jackson sneered. “I know you, motherfucker,” he said softly, looking right at me.
I didn’t smile.
Our team could not have differed more strikingly from my high school squad. Riverside Community College specialized in tough