I'm lying awake at 3 a.m. trying to figure out just what's going on
with the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones, Jimmy Johnson, and Barry Switzer.
"Why," I say aloud, "after two straight Super Bowl wins, change the
Jerry-Jimmy team to the Jerry-Barry team? Why?"
"Mmmph," my wife says. "If I tell you, will you go to sleep?"
"Sure," I say. She doesn't know anything about the Cowboys.
This'll be good for a laugh.
"It's because people kept confusing the names," she says. "Jerry
Jones sounds too much like Jimmy Johnson. All those Js. A millionaire
team doesn't like it when people confuse his name with his coach's
name. So he fires him and hires someone else. Now go to sleep."
"Not bad," I say. "Not bad at all. But I'm afraid it's more
serious than that, m'love. I'm afraid it's something awful. I'm afraid
it has something to do with Arkansas."
She pretends to snore while I tell her that Arkansas as we all know
by now is the epicenter of fraud, deceit, and corruption, a place so
corrupt that with the right broker a Democrat playing the commodies
market can make out like a Republican.
"They don't call it the 'Land of Opportunity' for nothing," I say.
She doesn't say anything and I take that as an invitation to continue.
God knows, I tell her, I don't want to cast any more aspersions on
the state. There may be nothing indictable about the Jerry-Barry-Jimmy
affair, but as everyone knows, if it originates in Arkansas, it's open
to insinuation.
"Did you know," I ask, "that Jerry, Barry, and Jimmy were all at
the University of Arkansas at the same time in the early sixties? Barry
was an assistant coach and Jerry and Jimmy were on the football team.
What do you say to that?"
She's shocked into silence.
"And look here," I say, turning on the bed light and opening
Barry's autobiography, Bootlegger's Boy. "It says here on page 64 that
Jerry let Barry's '55 Ford Fairlane roll down a hill into a tree and
that he didn't confess until years later when he'd made millions in the
oil business. How do you think that made Barry feel?"
"Snnrk," she says, rolling over.
"And that's not all," I say. "By 1970 Barry and Jimmy were both
assistant coaches at Oklahoma and the night before the Colorado game,
the coaching staff had some drinks and decided to dress up in their
wives' underwear."
"Did you just say," she asks, sitting upright, "that the coaches
dressed up in their wives' underwear?"
'Yes," I say, "and listen to this, right here on page 74: 'You
should have seen Jimmy Johnson. He wore the biggest set of boobies this
side of Las Vegas.' How do you think that made Jimmy feel?"
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The Truth, Mainly
"Boobies?" my wife says. "Barry Switzer said 'boobies'? Good Lord."
She's pretty wide awake now.
"So why are you telling me all this?" she asks. "What's the point?"
"The point is this," I say. "Bill Clinton was behind everything."
"Wasn't he was off being a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford then? How
could he be behind the Oklahoma coaches dressing up in their wives'
underwear?"
The connection, I tell her, is that Clinton came back to
Fayetteville in 1973 to teach at the law college.
"The man is so corrupt," I tell her, "that his return to his
homestate is one of the few examples we have of what historians call
'two-way temporal influence.' It means the event is so powerful,
shockwaves of influence spread both to the future and to the past."
"That," she snorts, "is the silliest thing I ever heard of."
"Not in Arkansas," I say. "Bill Clinton is connected to everything
corrupt that ever happened in the state or in any bordering states."
"You've gone off the edge," she says. "You want to see a Clinton
connection so bad your brains have dried up."
"Have not," I say. "Clinton pulls all the strings down there.
Always has. Always will. Don't you see he contrived to grow up in the
town of Hope just so he could use the name in political speeches? He
schemed to get to Boy's Nation in 1963 just so he could have his picture
taken with JFK in the Rose Garden. He married Hillary just so he could
have an unpaid adviser around all the time to tell him what to do."
"You're raving," she says. "Drink a glass of warm milk and go to
sleep. It'll be all better in the morning."
"And another thing," I say, my voice cracking, "That basketball
game last week. You don't really think Arkansas could beat Duke in a
fair contest, do you?"
"Hush," she says, gently stuffing a sock in my mouth. "Just hush now."
Satterfield is a college professor and writes as a means of discovery.
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