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Maybe it was time to grow up. I wasn’t in high school anymore. Plus, I didn’t want to disrespect Coach by not taking this seriously.
I heard the town car honk once outside my Manhattan townhouse. I came out and climbed in the back of the car, trading pleasantries with the driver. I was excited to return across the Hudson, and to be portrayed in a positive light for once, instead of being worried about getting into trouble like I always was.
Maybe I’d even stop to visit my mom, who was widowed but still living in my childhood home. I thought about the media coverage of the event, and how I could never seem to do anything right in their eyes. The team’s publicist wouldn’t allow bad press for the team on his watch, but the journalists covering for their independent papers didn’t take their marching orders from the New York Leviathans.
The public loved a good story about me, and that was how they sold papers. I guess selling papers must have been difficult, since they had to follow high profile people around, just hoping for one of us to fuck up. I never went out trying to hurt anyone. I was just having fun, albeit with the wrong women every time.
How is it that when a married woman goes home with me, pretending to be available, that it’s still my fault? She’s the one stepping out on her husband.
My mind still kept returning to that horrible couple of weeks, when everyone universally hated me: fans, the team, and even my own mother, it seemed. She asked me how I could disgrace the family name like this, and where my morals were at. She was only slightly understanding once I explained I hadn’t known that the woman was married, telling me that I shouldn’t be hooking up with strangers, anyway.
It seemed that no one at all was on my side. The sportscasters had even bantered about the story.
Obviously, I should hire one of these journalists to screen the women before I take them home, since they seem to know everything before I do.
I sometimes wondered if they set me up on occasion to create the story. Nothing would surprise me.
I was trying to muster some excitement for the kids. Caldwell was about thirty miles away from the football stadium, and my hometown had always taken its sports very seriously, especially when it came to the Leviathans’ rivalry with the Flags. The borough had remained relatively small, with less than 8000 people, and Caldwell still had that small town feel of a main street with some historic buildings.
Our claim to fame was being the birthplace of Grover Cleveland. I was stunned, going to college on the west coast, to learn that the rest of the country was not as intimately familiar with Cleveland, our 22nd and 24th president, as residents of Caldwell were. But I guess I might not have been as familiar with him either, if it hadn’t been drilled into me in every history class in school, since it was of such local significance.
Arriving at the community center, I was redirected to a back room to put on a Santa suit. I had to sit down with the organizer, Tom, while he explained that I would be asking each kid what they wanted for Christmas and giving each one a random Christmas present from a big bag they’d provide me with.
He said it was also my responsibility to ask the parents what their family wanted for Christmas. Someone from the organization would be standing nearby to take notes, and they were going to drive Santa’s sleigh through the military housing on Christmas Eve to deliver additional presents based on what each family needed.
“Why are you hiding me under a Santa suit?” I asked him.
It seemed like a waste of a good PR opportunity to advertise a New York Leviathan, then hide him behind a costume, but it wasn’t my job to tell Tom how to do his.
“Some of the members of team management and I agreed that, given all the drama that has seemed to follow you, maybe it’s best to write this up as showing how decent and selfless you were to keep out of the spotlight, to play Santa in a costume, all to help the kids from your hometown.”
“Sure, and you can pretend that I was never here if it doesn’t go well, I suppose,” I told him. “For your information, though, I don’t create the drama, or get some sick thrill from seeing my picture in the paper in compromising situations.”
Tom looked down at me over his glasses, which had almost retreated to the tip of his nose with all his talking.
“Well then. We should be on the same page, right? You’re here for the kids.”
“I am.”
