3.

We painted houses and talked Saints football. That’s how the summer before junior year passed. My parents paid Wayne and I to paint the trim on our nearly new brick home; a few neighbors saw us working and when they heard our absurdly low fee, they hired us out. This was all Wayne. I was simply the muscle who lugged cans and ladders and could be trusted with the roller but not much more. He had the hand of an Italian, those deft brush strokes as he worked around the little panes on the French doors, taking the pride of a craftsman with every move of his frame, every bit of evidence that he had ever been there. I just wanted it to be done. You could only get so sun burnt and so hot under the relentless New Orleans sun before you fell in a heap next to the azalea bushes and sucked down your body weight in ice water and sweet tea.

And always the subject was the Saints. Would this be the year that they finally won more than they lost? Our goals and their goals were so dim. A winning season, that’s all we wanted. It was like taking a class and striving for a C minus. But that was the reality of the Saints fan. Only three years ago the fans were wearing bags on their heads. Then Bum Phillips had come to town with his belt buckle and his cowboy hat and his passel of strange Houston Negroes, some of whom were ex-drugheads, a dangerous ingredient on a troubled team. Scandal after scandal had surrounded the Saints' teams of the late 70’s. It seemed reasonable to assume that drugs had been a factor in the team’s underperformance. How many times did they stride out to an early lead only to get pummeled in the second half? Clearly their special medications were wearing off. What was needed was a clean slate and Bum seemed to provide that. Run the football and stop the run. It was an admirable philosophy, one that recalled the era that had molded Bum. Tough football. We drank the Kool-Aid because we knew no better, though we should have. One need look no farther than the Saints’ own division to see the future of pro football. It was called the West Coast offense and it had already brought the 49ers the first of many championship trophies. Meanwhile Bum was stuck in 1970 when Vietnam was still hitting and grown men feared for their lives. Football had been different back then, more pressure, more violence, cheaper shots, dog eat dog. The game was changing. The players were realizing that they were essentially on a universal team and the enemy was the owner. The game needed to become more finesse-driven to protect those finely molded frames of muscle and bone.

That’s what I was thinking as we argued about starting quarterbacks. Wayne favored the Snake. I was a Wilson man. Each had their valid points. Ken Stabler was as grizzled as a trapper, a hard living Huckleberry Finn immersed in the body of a 90 year old man. He had one move when the pass rush came: duck. That was it. He couldn’t throw much farther than I could and he smoked cigarettes on the sideline during games. But he was the crafty old veteran who’d taken the Raiders to the Promised Land and thrown a lot of touchdowns to Biletnikoff and Branch. It was Stabler who brought the Raiders back from a 35-14 deficit that beat the Saints on Monday Night Football in 1979, a paralyzing loss that epitomized everything that the Saints of that era stood for. It was hard not to root for that dirty old man. But I liked Dave Wilson because I wanted to be Dave Wilson. Tall and blonde and strong-armed and freckle faced, he was California Tom Sawyer and he looked like the future on wheels. But those wheels had already taken a lick. The previous season against Houston, Wilson had taken a hit to the knee that shocked the schoolboy genius right out of his body. He’d never ever be the same quarterback but I couldn’t face that knowledge and neither could he and neither could the Saints. So I argued for that strong arm and those good looks and Wayne just smiled and said, “Shake ya’ Snake.”

The best part of the day came at the end when the brushes were washed and the hands were clean and our sweaty bodies were done with painting or hosing or scrubbing or whatever stage we were at in the job. Then we’d take Wayne’s car, the Honeybee, a Datsun B-210 painted yellow with a little bee on the door, down the road through the expanding neighborhoods of New Orleans East to a Time-Saver convenience store where they never asked for your ID as long as you looked like you knew what you were doing when you put a 6-pack of Tallboys on the counter and said, “Gimme a half pint of Bacardi Amber” when the man asked you if that was all. 99% of the time we were successful in procuring the adult rewards for our underage selves. Then it was time for the ride.

The ride is everything and nothing. The ride is the best part of living but you can’t do it alone and you can’t do it with just anyone. It has to be someone who doesn’t talk a lot. It has to be someone who can See, really See this world with all its fabulous beauty and all its cruel surprises. It has to be someone who appreciates a vintage 7-Up sign. It has to be someone that thinks the sound of crickets is one heartbeat closer to God. It has to be someone who can match you beer for beer and yet never get drunk. It has to be someone who likes music that you abhor like Country and watches shows that you avoid like pro-wrestling. That way you have things about each other that are uncertain. You see the humor where once you saw the mundane. You hear the keening sound of hearts breaking in a Texas wind under a Texas moon. You see the world anew on the ride with the friend who takes the ride with you, who drives and laughs and shakes his head at the stupid things you do and the stupid things you say. I miss those rides.