Junior Seau 3: The NFL Pays No Taxes
Jim drives, fast, on the highway, blasting “Man in the Box” by Alice in Chains. But Jim is forced to decelerate, taps his breaks as he passes a wreck, what looks like a huge pileup. Traffic then clogs like a stuffed pipe and all he can see in the horizon is taillights.
Flicking his gaze to the wreckage, he notices that a highway sign nearby reads: “Death 23.” A nausea ripples in the pit of his stomach.
A worse, more foreboding feeling overtakes him when he sees what resembles his daughter’s car among the debris of the wreck. Inching forward in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, Jim rubbernecks, fixes his squinted eyes on the license plate jutting from the crumpled mess of the vehicle. It reads: “LOSER.”
Jim is dizzy. A smack of vertigo causes his body to buckle, washes over him like a slow-breaking wave. He taps his brakes, then creeps forward in the crawling traffic. Over the din of Jerry Cantrell’s down-tuned guitar and ambient sounds of car horns and idling engines, Jim hears a familiar voice again.
It’s Junior.
“A human life. It’s a collection of moments, right? Say you have 80 years, that’s about 29,200 days; that’s 700,800 hours; 42,048,000 minutes; 2,522,880,000 seconds.
“Me, I lived 43 years, so that’s roughly 22,600,800 minutes. God as my calculator… The Bible is my textbook…”
“A collection of minutes. A scrapbook, brother. I never made a deal with the devil. Did you?”
Jim groans. He wants to vomit. He looks back in the rearview, doesn’t see Junior, but still hears his voice.
Then he sees Junior next to him, sitting in the passenger seat; blunted sunlight slanting in through the tinted windows, Jim understands the top of Junior’s head is missing, cut ear to ear. Junior’s skull is hollow, like an empty bowl.
“Please, see that my brain is given to the NFL brain bank, BUDDEE!” Junior chortles and says in a mock Pauly Shore voice.
Jim scoffs, flicks his gaze back to the road, the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
“Damn, brother, a flying car would be rad right now. It’s the 2020s and no flying cars? What a disappointing decade,” Junior grumbles, then points his swollen, scarred hand at the stereo, begins to play Hawaiian music, heavy on the ukulele.
“The headaches? They got you too? I wanted to shoot myself in the head,” Junior then hums to the ukulele plucking and sings, in an off-key cry, “Turn from the Bible with a bottle in my hand, wooooooooooooo!!”
Junior’s face twists in a contorted mass of anger, and he seethes, snarls at Jim, speaks in a voice of cruel truth, “It’s what you’re doing, brother. ‘Cept it’s that orange bottle. It’s those pills you been eating like candy. Who you think you’re fooling? You think they weren’t gonna find out the proposal tanked? You blew the cash?”
“Let’s fly,” Junior growls, and the car lifts off the ground, hovering over the traffic, flying like a helicopter, soaring slowly, over the congestion of the highway. The car’s engine roaring with a low guttural rumble as it ascends…
Junior giggles as golden sunlight dapples in from the windshield, luminating his heavy face, and he nods down at the highway below, “This is why Kobe liked helicopters. Rush hour traffic, right?
“Kobe’s in the star. He’s not here, with us. If I bring you along, I’ll be in the star. You and me. In the star. Together. Look, I know Samoans can be so jealous. But this isn’t about that… It’s about putting things right…”
Jim panics, is locked in his seat. It’s as if he’s strapped to an electric chair. His arms are chained, locked to his sides. He’s unable to move his legs.
His heartbeat pumps. His blood pressure spikes. He feels like he’s on a rollercoaster as the car flies through the air, flies toward God…
The car glides, then turns wide right, away from the highway. It approaches the main avenue where the ___ office building is located. Along the connecting intersection, Jim sees what look like slaves, several of them, Black men, in tattered clothing, hanging from a tall oak tree in front of a playground filled with screaming toddlers.
Junior juts his chin at the morbid sight, sneers and speaks mournfully, “That’s where a lynching site used to be, where they brought the disobedient slaves, the runaways. They’d leave them out there. They’d leave the corpses dangling from that tree. They left them there as a warning to the other slaves. God, it must have smelled like… It’s hard to picture that happening in America,” says Junior, in a somber voice.
“I’d take them with us if I could. But that’s for Chris Henry. It’s not our mission.”
“What IS our mission?” Jim wants to ask. But his mouth, his body goes numb, an overpowering numbness, like his entire body was shot up with a dentist’s jab of Novocain.
“Chris died on your birthday, remember that… Remember who said the NFL pays no taxes…”
The car touches down with a thump, rocking Jim’s numb body in his seat. Returning to ground, the car is driving, recklessly, on the street. The car driving on its own. The steering wheel moving by itself. The acceleration pedal pressing down. The engine throttling.
Junior jerks his open skull back at the backseat, which contains what looks like a ticking pipe bomb held up like a trophy by thousands of ghostly arms.
“We’re going out with a bang, brother.”
“I tried to be the MAN I should, but sometimes I fall short,” sings Jim, lugubriously, his dead lips moving involuntarily.
The car is driving on the sidewalk, and it smashes, head-on, into a thin young woman who was staring at her phone. The young blond rolls over the hood, cracking into the windshield and somersaulting over the car’s roof, tumbling lamely to the pavement.
Nearby pedestrians yell, shriek, dive, flee in terror; others point their phones at the wayward vehicle that is careening, barreling straight toward the front doorway of a tall, golden glass office tower.
The car accelerates with a mechanical roar, speeds and crashes into the dark glass swivel door of the tower’s lobby. It punches easily through the building’s exterior, crunches and shatters the façade, leaving a chaos, a nightmare of broken glass, clouds of dusty smoke trailing in its wake… Then a gunshot rings out, like a clap of thunder…
