Read Life's Work for Free Online Page A

the old-fashioned jukebox on the wall. "Fuck you, too," he said.
    A few minutes later the teenager came back with the food and arranged it carefully on the table. She smiled shyly at Bluerock when she was through.
    "You're Otto Bluerock, aren't you?" she said in a tiny voice. '
    "I used to be," Bluerock said, picking up his fork.
    "Man, you're good," she said.
    Bluerock put down the fork and smiled at her. "I was good, wasn't I?"
    "The best," the girl said. She held out a piece of paper and a pencil. "Do you mind?"
    "I guess not," he said.
    He gave the girl his autograph. She tucked it in her breast pocket, patted it, and walked away.
    "Nice kid," Bluerock said, bending to his plate. I laughed.
    Bluerock looked up, egg hanging from his mouth. "Do I contradict myself?" he intoned. "Okay. I contradict myself. Or however the hell it goes."
 
 
    After breakfast, Bluerock ran out of steam. The concussion was catching up with him, along with everything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. He was a tough guy, but he wasn't Superman.
    "I've had it," he said, as we walked out to the car. "Better take me back to camp. It's a helluva way to spend my last day as a Cougar-sleeping."
    There was no easy way to put it, so I said it outright. "They told me not to take you back to camp. They told me to take you home."
    Bluerock's jaw knotted up and his face went gray, but he didn't say a word. When we got in the car, he huddled by the door and stared darkly at the bleak Newport streets.
    I started the Pinto and pulled out into the sparse morning traffic. Bluerock sat silently by the door. I took the suspension bridge over the Ohio and headed north toward Vine and the downtown blocks. When we got to Fountain Square -or what passes for it nowadays- I asked Otto where he lived.
    "Wheeler Street," he said sullenly, and gave me an address in Clifton.
    I drove up Vine to the parkway, past the red brick facade of Music Hall and through the Over-the-Rhine wasteland to Ravine Street and then east on Warner. He was almost asleep when we got to Wheeler, head drooping against the car window, eyelids squeezed shut like a sleeping dog's. I coasted up Wheeler until I came to the address he'd given me. It wasn't much of a house for a football player -a two-story frame Victorian with a porch like a sprung cushion and two narrow strips of burned-out grass for a yard. It was the house of a man who didn't really think of it as home.
    "We're here," I said.
    He opened one eye and squinted at the dilapidated building.
    "Jesus," he said mournfully.
    Bluerock pulled himself upright with a groan, opened the door and got out.
    "I'll be in touch, Stoner," he said over his shoulder, and trudged wearily up to the door.
 

    VI
    I went home.
    The day's heat had already filled the apartment, and I began to sweat as soon as I stepped through the door. I stripped off my shirt, got a beer out of the refrigerator, flipped on the Globemaster, and collapsed on the couch. Appropriately enough, the man being interviewed on NPR was talking sports. I pressed the cold beer can to my forehead and listened sleepily to his familiar spiel. Athletes, he said, were in the entertainment business. They were show folk, like actors and singers, and because their careers onstage were so short and risky, they deserved to make as much money as they could get, even if that meant the renegotiation of contracts.
    I had the gut feeling that no actor would last very long if he constantly demanded the renegotiations of his contracts in the middle of films. In fact, I wasn't sure I bought the show-business analogy at anything but the most superficial level. Otto Bluerock certainly wouldn't have. According to him, neither would Bill Parks. Otto didn't think of himself as an entertainer. True, he demonstrated his talents before a crowd, but that was because that was where the game was played on Sunday afternoons. During the rest of the week it went on outside the white lines. According