After Bathing at Baxters Page 7

  Final Payments

  Anyone who’s been involved in the game, they’ll have a story of how they got started. About how some teacher noticed them in a kickabout at school, some scout picked them out of a youth team game. Some old ex-pro their dad knew; some TV programme about George Best. Even the legends – Charlton, Moore, Hurst – they’ll all have their stories. With me it was my dad, which isn’t as straightforward as it sounds, really, because my dad wasn’t around much when we were kids – he was a traveller in fancy goods, lighters, cigarettes, that sort of thing – and when he was there he was the kind of bloke who goes down the pub instead of sitting in the front room. Still, he saw it, and you have to give him credit for that.

  What was even weirder was that at the time – I was thirteen or fourteen maybe – I didn’t even like football that much, certainly not with other kids, and if anyone suggested a pick-up game I’d be the first to scoot. But I used to go out to the park sometimes – the old park near the Scrubs that isn’t there any more – and kick around, always on my own, with one eye on the path to make sure I could pick up the ball and scarper if anyone else looked as if they wanted to join in. Anyway, I was doing this one time, back in 1975 it would have been, the year Fulham had their Cup-run, when I looked up and saw my dad walking towards me over the grass, coming on slowly in that vague way he had, as if he didn’t quite know who he was or where he was going. I had the ball on the ground and was sitting on it before you could whistle, but my dad just sort of smiled a bit and carried straight on – he had a way of making you think that whatever you were doing wasn’t really important compared to him. But when I got back home that evening he walked into the kitchen where I was having my tea and said, ‘Saw you playing down on the park this afternoon didn’t I?’ Even then, you see, my dad and me didn’t get on, so I just nodded, casual like, but waiting to see what would happen next. Then he said, ‘You ever play in a team or anything?’ It was stupid, when you came to think about it. All those years I’d been doing swimming at school or going on at him to teach me snooker, and now all of a sudden just because he’d seen me playing football he’d come sniffing round to see if there was anything in it for him. I shook my head, but that didn’t worry my dad – he knew what I thought about him by this stage – and he just nodded again. But all that week I caught him giving me a glance or two, the sort of glance he’d give women in shops if he thought my mum wasn’t looking, and I knew something was up. The thing about my dad was that he had connections – always knew which horse to back, who to go and see if you wanted a car or a sofa on the never-never – so I wasn’t surprised when he got me the trial at Rangers. One Friday night after school it was. And I can remember the coach saying when I went up for a high cross and missed it, ‘Jesus, I don’t suppose he’s ever headed a ball in his life.’ But I passed it all the same. Typically, my dad didn’t turn up – it was fixing he liked, and getting me the trial meant he’d finished his side of the bargain.

  Fulham got to the final that year: I watched every game. They had Bobby Moore playing for them – he was getting ready to retire, but he was still good even then – but somehow when they came out of the Wembley tunnel you knew they were never going to beat West Ham.

  I’d already played a couple of games in the youth team by then. They’d started me out in defence, but then moved me into midfield on account of my height – I’m five feet seven, which is small for a footballer – but the youth team coach said there’d be no problem about signing schoolboy forms in a year or so. Curiously enough, I wasn’t really thinking about it. Plenty of kids down our way fancied themselves as footballers, and you were always hearing about lads who’d signed for Brentford or Chelsea, or turned out for Millwall juniors, but somehow it never came to anything, and a year or so later you’d come across them stacking trolleys in Sainsbury’s or looking lost in some Sunday League game. The other Rangers apprentices used to talk big. sometimes about how they’d make the first team at seventeen, about how there were scouts from the big clubs already looking them over. But I kept my head down, and by ’77 or ’78 old Lennie the reserve team manager reckoned I was well on my way to making it. You might not be able to do anything about your height, but you can make it work to your advantage, and anywhere around the centre spot the small guy always has it over the six-footer with no pace. I had this trick of shielding the ball as I turned: you had to be a clever centre back to do anything about it.

  I can remember the first time I played for the first team: it was the day after my dad finally walked out on us. To be fair it wasn’t any big surprise. There’d been women before, all during the time I was a kid – though it always suited my mum not to notice – and then when I was fifteen he’d got this new travelling job with a big confectionery firm in the Midlands, which meant being away from home even more. All the same, I could have done without being told about Carole or Denise or whatever her name was – they’d got a house by this time, somewhere up Wolverhampton way – and my mum in floods of tears the morning before the Leicester game. We won, as it happened, but I didn’t remember much about it. I was too busy thinking about my dad standing there in the front room – he was wearing this new suit, and you could see that he really fancied himself in it – and wondering what we were going to do about money. Looking back, I suppose I don’t blame my dad that much – he was a good-looking bloke, even in his fifties, and he liked a drink and a talk, which was something my mum was never much interested in – but at the time it was as if he’d stuck two fingers up to the first eighteen years of my life. If I could have got hold of him, I’d have said something like ‘All that time when we were kids, if it was so bad why didn’t you say so instead of pretending?’ If one of your parents makes it clear that they’d sooner not be there, then you start blaming yourself; or them, which is the same thing in a way.

  It was November when he left: three months into the season. I was brilliant the rest of that year. Dave Marshall, the old centre half who I’d been brought in to cover for, spent a couple of months in the reserves and then got sold to some non-league outfit because of me. Come April we were in the top six, and we would have got promoted to the Second if we hadn’t drawn the last three games. I suppose it was my dad driving me on. There were times, standing by the touchline waiting for a throw-in, mostly, or drifting up through the midfield, when I’d think I saw him in the crowd, turning away, say, behind an advertising hoarding, hidden in the shadow under the roof of the big stand. It’s not true that footballers don’t see the people watching: I used to think I was stuck in the middle of an enormous room crowded with screaming faces.

  We didn’t see him again for a while after that. He’d send my mum a postcard – some town in the North where he was stopping overnight – or there’d be a phone call sometimes late at night, but that was all. As far as us kids were concerned, it was as if we didn’t exist. When she was fifteen Angie won a dance competition at the Hammersmith Apollo, and we sent him the photograph in the paper and everything, but he never wrote back. After a time, though, I stopped worrying about it. I was nineteen, twenty, playing in the first team every week, there was the odd piece in the Recorder about how Spurs were interested in me, and I didn’t have to look for company. I’d wonder about the old man sometimes, what it was like in Wolverhampton with Louise or Kay – Carole or Denise was long gone by this time – but it never hit me, like the day it did when he walked out. Meanwhile the family settled down. Angie was doing her nurse’s training at the Charing Cross; I was in digs near the ground – I always liked it that you could just see the floodlights out of the upstairs window; the old lady got a council flat Harlesden way. I used to stay over there at weekends, if it wasn’t an away game. She had this framed photo of me in that classic footballer’s pose – down on one knee, hands crossed over the other one – taken the day I signed on as a pro – on top of the TV, along with the picture of Angie in her dancing gear, old holiday snaps taken in Southend and Clacton.

  It was the early eighties by
then, and Rangers were still in the Third. Every so often they’d have a run, win half a dozen games in a row, say, and the Recorder would run ‘Rangers for the top flight?’ headlines, but they never fooled me. I knew there wasn’t the money, or the interest. The chairman used to go on sometimes about redeveloping the ground and buying in big players, but in the meantime the old wooden stand was falling apart and you could have unloaded the whole defence for a hundred thousand. There were some other bad signs as well. We went through three managers in ‘82–3, and Jimmy Wood, the only centre forward we’d had who was any good, got sold to Man United for half a million, which was big money in those days.

  What with Jimmy going, and the rest of the players not liking it, the Cup run took us by surprise. We nearly went out in the first round to a bunch of non-league amateurs from the West Country, and it took a fluky penalty to get us through. But we beat another Third Division side in the second, and then went to Coventry and won 2–1 on an ice-rink in the third. People started looking up after that, and there were a couple of giant-killer pieces in the papers, but even so nobody expected us to make it through the fourth, which was a home tie against Newcastle. Newcastle! It had been Carlisle away the week before. We packed in 17,000 people that day, and scraped home 1–0, with three of ours booked and the Newcastle skipper stretchered off with a broken leg – you could have heard the bone crack south of the river – and the chairman was supposed to have made five grand out of the bookies.

  The rest of it was a blur. We played Everton at Goodison in the fifth, and it went to a second replay, but we shaded it 3–2 and I had that kind of warm feeling you get when you know your career’s on a roll. I’d been a bit bogged down the last couple of seasons – there’d been a month on loan to Arsenal, but in the end they hadn’t wanted me, and a try-out for the Under-21s – but now there were serious blokes in the Telegraph and the Mail going on about the Rangers midfield powerhouse and its talented playmaker, and the whole team, right down to Vinnie Cousins the reserve team goalkeeper, knew that once it was all over the big clubs would come diving in and nothing old Samuels the chairman could do would stop them.

  Funnily enough, the rest of it was a doddle. Some Second Division lot – it might have been Oldham or Port Vale – in the sixth round; 2–0 against Villa in the semi. It was mayhem by then. The papers were full of celebrities going on about how they’d always been Rangers fans – I’d never seen any of them down the ground, and neither had anyone else, and the manager got invited on all the TV sports programmes. But the final looked dodgy: Liverpool. They were ten points clear of the First that year, and they hadn’t lost a game in three months. He rang up the day after the semi-final. ‘It’s your dad here’ – just like that, as if we’d spoken to each other every week for the last five years. ‘Wondered if you could do me a couple of tickets for the final?’ Of course I said yes – he was my dad, after all, and I felt I owed it to him – but all the same I wasn’t going to make a fuss about it. I just put the tickets in an envelope and sent them off, second class, and forgot about it. But then a week before the final, when it was really just a question of keeping your mind off everything, I went round to see the old lady in Harlesden. I could tell by the way she looked at me when I came through the door that something was up, and sure enough the first thing she said was ‘Your dad’s been round’. ‘Oh yes, and what did he want?’ I asked, fairly cold, because I know the old lady can be a soft touch, but she just went on about old times and keeping in contact. He’d come in an Audi Quattro, apparently, so business must have been looking up. It was only when I got up to go that I realised the photo was missing from the top of the TV. According to the old lady – she started crying when I asked her about it – he’d said he wanted ‘something to remember me by’.

  I was so angry I had to wait until the evening to ring him up. ‘Those tickets,’ I said, before he could get a word in, ‘I want them back. Now.’ I think he must have worked out what I was on about, because he tried to make a joke out of it. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Not allowed to come and see my own son playing in the Cup Final?’ ‘The tickets,’ I said. I want them back.’ After that it got nasty. ‘You can whistle for them,’ he said. ‘Mandy’s looking forward to this, and I promised her we’d go.’ I nearly broke the receiver when I put it down.

  You’ll remember from the papers what happened. We lost 5–1, and never had a chance. All down to the weak midfield, the commentators said, but I wouldn’t know. I went down on the bus and stayed in the hotel all right, but I was gone before breakfast. I can remember ending up in a pub in Oxford Street and coming out and hearing someone say that Liverpool had won, but not much else. The queer thing was that I could remember it all: that day knocking the ball about on the old park, my dad walking towards me over the wet grass. But I knew then, knew already, that it was all over. And that I never wanted to kick a ball again.

  Three Stories from Cook County

  I. At Brackus’s

  His father, old Joe Brackus, had opened the first gas station up on Choctaw the summer after they had built the freeway extension and turned the stony plateau with its view out over Tennessee and the river into a tourist site. He had put in an ice-cream parlour and a kiosk which sold cigarettes and Seven-Up, and for a time the teenagers who drove their girlfriends up there at the weekends and the aged joyriding couples who strayed over the state border by accident would stop and ask him directions or buy guttering tubs of Dixiecup ice-cream which was the parlour’s stock-in-trade. But then the ridge had been bought by a real estate company from Memphis who wanted to build a block of timeshare apartments, the teenagers started heading West to Dyersburg where there was a marina complex, and Brackus found himself with an empty forecourt and a ten thousand dollar compensation fee: so he put the money into Brackus’s.

  It was the sort of place you find occasionally in the South, which is emulative of so many other places in the South that the effect borders on parody. There was a neon sign that said Brackus’s Bar and Diner, there were menu cards printed in the shape of opening saloon doors and bowls of sawdust for cigarette ends. And because old Brackus was a bluegrass boy whose family had originally come out of Kentucky during the Depression, there was a squat, rickety stage where country bands used to play on Saturday nights, and a set of buckskin gear which the waitresses sometimes wore to serve drinks at the bar. ‘Pure Annie Oakley,’ Barrett the journalist used to say, but on the strength of it Joe Brackus got himself profiled in Dixie magazine standing under a Confederate flag on which was printed the slogan ‘The South Will Rise’.

  The Dixie profile was a portent. Unexpectedly, Brackus’s had paid its way right from the start. Saturday nights would find a restive, cosmopolitan crowd packed together on the narrow benches or seated raucously around the big pine tables which Joe had got out of an L.L. Bean catalogue. Denimed wiseacres from the farming end of Cook County, seventy miles away, moneyed Nashville brats with their daddies’ credit cards, the local lumpenproletariat from the Choctaw sawmills. In its second year of existence Brackus’s got a mention in one of the Nashville listings magazines. Not long afterwards the Dixie Dance-Kings played there at the end of their first Southern tour and Joe Brackus added on a children’s parlour extension, bought his wife some cosmetic surgery and wondered about sending his kids to college.

  There were two children: Scott and an older girl called Elaine. ‘Snipped right off the Southern vine,’ Barrett sometimes said, in the days when he wrote reviews of the house bands in the local paper and occasionally had dinner at the Brackus bungalow on Sunday nights, but the precision masked an uncharacteristic lack of certainty. Joe Brackus was an easy-going, two hundred pound small-towner who, even after Brackus’s got put into all the regional guidebooks and Waylon Jennings turned up unannounced to play at a charity benefit, would still walk into the local drugstore on a Saturday afternoon and treat himself to a family pack of See’s chocolates. The kids were different. For a start they were brighter. They were sharper. They we
ren’t your couple of average Southern kids who wonder maybe about going to Nashville and working in real estate but end up settling for a third share each in the old man’s timber yard. All through the early years you could see old Joe figuratively scratching his head about Scott and Elaine. They dug around the local schools for a while – finishing up at high school in Jackson, which pleased Brackus – but you could tell that it was all temporary, that they viewed the old man as an embarrassment who happened to be their father. Eventually Elaine married a Florida lawyer she met at a rock concert one Fall in Miami and went to live down in Tampa Bay. She had a job in an architect’s office and came home at Christmas, although Barrett used to say that the architect’s office was a front and he had seen her once in an X-movie he had got from a video store. Yeah.

  That left Scott. Cook County wasn’t the easiest place in the world to be Scott Brackus, but he managed it somehow. He played baseball for the local team, the Cook County Pirates, and you saw him occasionally with the busty cheerleaders in the back parlour of Brackus’s. When he was nineteen he won a talent contest hosted by the Nashville country station, and the picture of him dressed in his denim cowpoke’s outfit shaking hands with some tubby little WA 125 announcer was taped to the wall of Brackus’s. Old Joe had hopes for Scott, in that shy, puzzled way which substitutes ambition for understanding. When a second division country band played Brackus’s Scott would be there backslapping with the musicians, helping to tune the steel guitars, sometimes bobbing up on stage to take part in an encore or emcee some starry-eyed pack of Louisiana grizzlies who thought Brackus’s was the big time. Sometimes he did session work, away in Memphis, with the Dixie Stealers, the Cottonpickers, bands you had heard of. They had a habit of never putting the session players’ names on the record sleeves. But he looked the part. He played a big, unwieldy Hofner Les Paul in a laboured style which the oldtimers said reminded them of Roy Orbison. And though the drinks at Brackus’s were more expensive than anywhere else in the county, and old Joe wouldn’t let him run up a tab, Scott was there drinking most nights of the week.