| | | Editor's Note: When we got to work today, we found another e-mail from that bartending, skateboarding buddy of ours in California. We decided to pass it along again. A word of warning: always wear a helmet.
Chapter Eight
... in which our hero and Junior Seau experience an action-packed happy hour together
Sometimes being an extreme sports competitor makes me a better bartender. When you're used to being out there on the edge, when every next moment could mean a broken limb, you know how to spot trouble coming at you.
And I knew it was coming this week at Lore's Sports Bar. I knew it as soon as I saw the guy sit down next to Junior Seau. Junior is a great guy. And, of course, a great linebacker. But this time of the year -- NFL playoff time -- means Junior, being a San Diego Charger, is just trying to get through Eliminationville. And you know by the way his hand is strangling his drink he's really out there on the field strangling a quarterback.
I watch the guy introduce himself to Junior.
"My name is Jean-Claude Sabolle," he says.
He's talking in a French accent. About how this American football is a very interesting game. Very violent. Very fascinating.
"N'est-ce pas?" he says.
Junior's just grinding his teeth, trying to watch the game. But the guy keeps bugging him. Jean-Claude announces he's some artsy French filmmaker. Says he finds the super, extreme slow-motion replays of quarterbacks getting concussed and running backs bending their knees and ankles 12 different ways in AstroTurf seams "tres magnifique." He's making a movie cutting together all these slow-motion, contorted joints and grimaces of pain and entering it in next year's Cannes Film Festival, and he's wondering if Junior will star.
I'm thinking it would be one of those instant American Film Institute classics that the Library of Congress would have to preserve under the Capitol dome. But I can tell Junior doesn't think so. Normally, I would go to our manager Stu Getzler to tap Jean-Claude on the shoulder and ask if he wouldn't mind moving a couple seats away. Because I see the slow burn on Junior. But Stu is out sick, which in a way is actually a good thing for me, because he wants to fire me (see Chapter 6).
I decide to take matters into my own hands. I put a plate of Extreme Nachos with Pork and Ole Sauce in front of Jean-Claude.
|  | | Junior Seau and the Chargers are stuck in Eliminationville. |
Right away I realize, take away the goatee and the cigarette holder and he's not some French cinema guru. He's Danny Feldman, a guy who used to be a producer at Fox Sports West until he put together some film clip criticizing the Dodgers for getting rid of Mike Piazza. Which didn't go over too well with his bosses, who just happen to own the team. Hey, we report, you decide, right? I've made a life's work out of landing on my head, and I'm still not that dumb.
Anyway, I'm just about to execute what in bartenderese we call a "pullover." Which is where you yank a guy forward by the shirt collar and slam his face into the oak until he becomes environmentally friendly.
I'll always believe I could have defused things that way. But before I can straighten Danny out and maybe calm Junior down, six huge guys pull up seats at a table.
They had walked in from what they call "practice" for a new XFL franchise. The one run by that wrestler Vince McMahon.
Now, X is my favorite letter. And I'll have plenty to say about the new football league, and about my own tryout, in a couple of future chapters. But these guys' tachometers are still running a little hot, if you know what I mean. They've been working on punt returns -- you have to look up in the sky to field the football while a coach drives a golf cart into you at 25 mph.
They're all over Junior in five seconds. How they're playing real football. How Junior played college ball at USC, which has sunk so low it can't even get a coach and Pete Carroll is the name of some crappy men's clothing store you wouldn't be caught dead in and Ryan Leaf would go down if you closed a playbook on his bunion.
"He played for a sucky college. Now he's playing for a sucky pro team," one of the guys snorts.
In any language, that's called the last straw. Junior can't take anymore.
If Lore's is any saloon other than a bar specializing in Extreme Nachos with Pork, not to mention a variety of other toppings, including pork rind, chili pepper, honey-coated Brazil nuts and free-range quail, maybe this doesn't become the messiest food fight of all time.
But that's how it'll go down.
Chips and salsa are flying through the air. Junior gets off his stool and grunts, "Hut-hut," and blitzes the guys' table, turning it over with one big charge, as if bull-rushing Donovan McNabb. Plates and bottles and glasses scatter. Nachos dangle from the ceiling like stalactites. And Junior dumps a heating tray full of Extreme Nachos with Lima Beans on Danny Feldman's head, right where his beret had been.
Midway through it, we're all writhing around in the glop on the floor, and we realize we're all laughing.
Me. Junior. The XFL guys. Danny. The place is a mess. Everything is covered in goo. Even Stu Getzler's prized possession, his autographed picture of that old Dodger gopher-ball reliever Tom Niedenfuhr we always kid him about.
Being the competitor I am, I'm totally stoked about how I vaulted over the bar and boarded into the trouble on a cocktail tray.
But knowing how my job status has been a little shaky, I'm worried that the patrons I'm paid to keep happy might not be so thrilled. I don't want Junior Seau to go home with a mad on.
But the funny thing is, when I look over I see a big grin beneath all the hot sauce covering his face. I guess when you work as hard and get so little as he does, you need to find what the ancient Greeks called a release.
Every competitor does. Including me, I realize. Just to get back in the groove.
They call it happy hour.
They don't know how happy.
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