Patrick nodded to the nice-looking young man standing at the bar with the depressed-looking doorman. His name was Loren or Goran, or possibly Zorbid; the brother was shy and he'd mumbled his name.
But when Vlad or Vlade or Lewis went off to the men's room--he'd been drinking glass after glass of cranberry juice and soda--the shy brother confided to Patrick, "He doesn't mean any harm, Mr. Wallingford. He's just a little confused about things. He doesn't know you're not Paul O'Neill, even though he does know it. I honestly believed that, after the lion thing, he would finally get it. But he doesn't. Most of the time, you're just Paul O'Neill to him. I'm sorry. It must be a nuisance."
"Please don't apologize," Patrick said. "I like your brother. If I'm Paul O'Neill to him, that's fine. At least I've left Cincinnati."
They both looked a little guilty, just sitting there at the bar, when Vlad or Vlade or Lewis returned from the men's room. Patrick regretted that he hadn't asked the normal brother what the confused doorman's real name was, but the moment had passed. Now the three-named doorman was back; he looked more like his old self because he'd changed into his uniform in the men's room.
The doorman handed his regular clothes to his brother, who put them in a backpack resting against the footrail at the bar. Patrick hadn't seen the backpack until now, but he realized that this was part of a routine with the brothers. Probably the normal brother came back in the morning to take Vlad or Vlade or Lewis home; he looked like that kind of good brother.
Suddenly the doorman put his head down on the bar as if he wanted to go to sleep on the spot. "Hey, come on--don't do that," his brother said affectionately to him. "You don't want to do that, especially not in front of Mr. O'Neill."
The doorman lifted his head. "I just get tired of workin' so late, sometimes," he said. "No more night shifts, please. No more night shifts."
"Look--you have a job, don't you?" the brother said, trying to cheer him up.
Miraculously--that quickly!--Vlad or Vlade or Lewis broke into a grin. "Gosh, look at me," he said. "I'm feelin' sorry for myself while I'm sittin' with the best right fielder I can think of, and he's got no left hand! And he bats left and throws left, too. I'm very sorry, Mr. O'Neill. I got no business feelin' sorry for myself in front of you."
Naturally Wallingford felt sorry for himself, too, but he wanted to be Paul O'Neill for a little while longer. It was the beginning of getting away from being the old Patrick Wallingford.
Here he was, disaster man, cultivating a look for the cocktail hour. The look was just an act, the lion guy knew, but the pity-me part was true.
CHAPTER FIVE
An Accident on
Super Bowl Sunday
ALTHOUGH MRS. CLAUSEN had written to Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates that she was from Appleton, Wisconsin, she meant only that she'd been born there. By the time of her marriage to Otto Clausen, she was living in Green Bay, the home of the celebrated professional football team. Otto Clausen was a Packer fan; he drove a beer truck for a living, and the only bumper sticker he permitted was in Green Bay green on a field of gold.
PROUD TO BE A CHEESEHEAD!
Otto and his wife had made plans to go to their favorite sports bar in Green Bay on Sunday night, January 25, 1998. It was the night of Super Bowl XXXII, and the Packers were playing the Denver Broncos in San Diego. But Mrs. Clausen had felt sick to her stomach all day; she would say to her husband, as she often did, that she hoped she was pregnant. She wasn't--she had the flu. She quickly developed a fever and threw up twice before kickoff. Both the Clausens were disappointed that it wasn't morning sickness. (Even if she were pregnant, she'd had her period only two weeks ago; it would have been too soon for her to have had morning sickness.)
Mrs. Clausen's moods were very readable--at least Otto believed that he usually knew what his wife was thinking. She wanted to have a baby more than anything in the world. Her husband wanted her to have one, too--she couldn't fault him for that. She just felt awful about having no children, and she knew that Otto felt awful about it, too.
Regarding this particular case of the flu, Otto had never seen his wife so sick; he volunteered to stay home and take care of her. They could watch the game on the TV in the bedroom. But Mrs. Clausen was so ill that she couldn't imagine watching the game, and she was a virtual cheesehead, too; that she'd been a Packer fan all her life was a principal bond between her and Otto. She even worked for the Green Bay Packers. She and Otto could have had tickets to the game in San Diego, but Otto hated to fly.
Now it touched her deeply: Otto loved her so much that he would give up seeing the Super Bowl at the sports bar. Mrs. Clausen wouldn't hear of his staying home. Although she felt too nauseated to talk, she summoned her strength and declared, in a complete sentence, one of those oft-repeated truths of the sports world that render football fans mute with agreement (at the same time striking everyone indifferent to football as a colossal stupidity). "There's no guarantee of returning to the Super Bowl," Mrs. Clausen stated.
Otto was childishly moved. Even on her sickbed, his wife wanted him to have fun. But one of their two cars was in the body shop, the result of a fender-bender in a supermarket parking lot. Otto didn't want to leave his wife home sick without a car.
"I'll take the beer truck," he told her. The truck was empty, and Otto was friends with everyone at the sports bar; they would let him park the truck at the delivery entrance. There weren't going to be any deliveries on a Super Bowl Sunday.
"Go, Packers!" his wife said weakly--she was already falling asleep. In a gesture of unspoken physical tenderness that she would long remember, Otto put the TV remote on the bed beside her and made sure that the television was on the correct channel.
Then he was off to the game. The beer truck was lighter than he was used to; he kept checking his speed while he maneuvered the big vehicle through the near-empty Sunday streets. Not since he was six or seven had Otto Clausen missed the kickoff of a Packer game, and he wouldn't miss this one. He may have been only thirty-nine, but he'd seen all thirty-one previous Super Bowls. He would see Super Bowl XXXII from the opening kickoff to the bitter end.
Most sportswriters would concede that the thirty-second Super Bowl was among the best ever played--a close, exciting game that the underdog won. It is common knowledge that most Americans love underdogs, but not in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the case of Super Bowl XXXII, where the upstart Denver Broncos beat the Packers, rendering all cheeseheads despondent.
Green Bay fans were borderline suicidal by the end of the fourth quarter--not necessarily Otto, who was despondent but also very drunk. He'd fallen sound asleep at the bar during a beer commercial in the final two minutes of the game, and while he woke up the moment play resumed, he had suffered another unabridged edition of his worst recurring dream, which seemed to be hours longer than the commercial.
He was in a delivery room, and a man who was just a pair of eyes above a surgical mask was standing in a corner. A female obstetrician was delivering his wife's baby, and a nurse whom he was certain he'd never seen before was helping. The obstetrician was Mrs. Clausen's regular OB-GYN; the Clausens had been to see her together, many times.
Although Otto hadn't recognized the man in the corner the first time he'd had the dream, he n
ow knew in advance who the man was, thus giving him a sense of foreboding.
When the baby was born, the joy on his wife's face was so overwhelming that Otto always cried in his sleep. That was when the other man removed his mask. It was that playboy TV reporter--the lion guy, disaster man. What the fuck was his name? Anyway, the joy in Mrs. Clausen's expression was directed at him, not at Otto; it was as if Otto weren't really in the delivery room, or as if only Otto knew he was there.