Four or five sports writers were hanging around the lobby. They slapped me on the back and told me how I’d be back next season and the leg would be fine and I’d rack up a six-yard average. I said, “Sure, sure,” and after a while I got away from them and went up to the room. I undressed for a shower, and looked at it. It had knitted all right; I didn’t even limp. It didn’t feel awkward or look any different from the other one except for some scar tissue. It was just great, except that it wasn’t worth a damn any more. The only thing I’d ever owned in my life was a mechanism that ran like something bathed in oil and now it had been smashed and when they put it back together something was gone. Maybe there isn’t any name for it, actually. The medics will give you a song and dance about co-ordination and instantaneous response and frammis on the updike, but I don’t think they know either. The nearest you can come to it is that it’s a smooth surge of power from dead standstill to full speed in about three strides, and you either have it or you don’t. If you have it, you can sell it—or at least you can until you get past thirty or thirty-two and it begins to slow down on you. I’d taken a short cut. A drunk sideswiped me and knocked me off the highway and when I quit rolling I was sitting in a ditch holding a Buick convertible in my lap. I thought of five more years and sixty to seventy thousand dollars doing the only thing I had ever liked or was any good at, and my hands knotted. I swung my fist at the leg and knocked it off the luggage stand where it was propped. The big lump of muscle on the calf ridged up and hurt as I walked into the shower. I stared bleakly at the white tile wall while the water poured over me. The dirty, sad, drunken, son— There wasn’t even any use cursing him. He was dead. He’d been killed in the same wreck.

I checked out before the squad came in from practice, caught a bus into Los Angeles, and sat around the airport until I could get on a plane going east. I didn’t really know where I was going, and didn’t care. I got off in New Orleans and for one of the few times in my life I went on a binge myself. It was a honey and lasted a week; when I began to come out of it I was in a motel somewhere on U.S. 90 out toward the Mississippi line with a girl named Frances. I never did know her last name and couldn’t figure out where she’d come from or how we’d got away out there unless they’d put us off a bus, but it didn’t seem to matter. She knew nothing about football and cared less, and had never heard of me, which was fine, but she drank like somebody trying to finish a highball while a cab was waiting outside with the meter running. She seemed to think something terrible was going to happen to her if she ever sobered up. The third morning I got up while she was still asleep and caught a bus back to town. I didn’t know what the answer was yet, but drinking wasn’t it.