Friday, January 31, 2014

three-time Pro Bowl offensive lineman Lincoln Kennedy, lucky number thirteen in Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



"The thing is, when the five years is up on a former player, and the medical insurance is gone and you're on your own, there are things – I know this firsthand, personally – that will be excluded if you try to go to a private insurance carrier and get covered. The joint surgeries and everything else? They won't cover them. So what is a guy to do? What is a guy to do about his brain when he takes his medical records and he's asked, 'How many concussions did you sustain? Three or more? Two or more?' What's the cutoff? When will a private carrier say, 'Well, we can't insure that'?"

it's Friday afternoon somewhere (actually, it's Friday afternoon here), which means it's time for another interview with one of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over concussions and other head injuries. today we talk to former Atlanta Falcons and Oakland Raiders offensive lineman Lincoln Kennedy.

my thanks, as always, to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt eleven)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

On September 22, state and federal investigators flew north with sets of tissue samples from eighteen of the Memorial Medical Center bodies and delivered them to National Medical Services, Inc., a forensic toxicology laboratory in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. In an acidic-smelling corner of a long, open room with scuffed walls, technicians extracted the samples into tiny, metal-capped containers shaped like medicine vials and sent them through gas chromatography/mass spectrometry machines bearing nicknames, including “Morticia” and “Gomez.”



Thursday, January 30, 2014

former New York Jets quarterback Al Woodall, the twelfth interview in Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



"I remember we played in Buffalo, and it was actually, I think, the last offensive play, which actually I threw a touchdown. And I got my bell rung, definitely, and I was on the ground, got helped up, walked off the field with some help, and that was the end of it. Nobody ever said anything to me. I got on the bus and there weren't any seats left so I was standing in the aisle, and one of the coaches said, 'Hey, we've got a guy here that got hit in the head. Somebody let him sit down.'"

day four in a row of interview with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over concussions and other head injuries. today we talk to former Duke University and New York Jets quarterback Al Woodall.

my thanks, as always, to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt ten)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

Kathleen Fournier solicited another opinion later, as she and pulmonologist John Thiele struggled to euthanize two Siamese cats around a corner from where the patients lay on the second floor. The cats belonged to a pharmacist who lived alone and considered them her children. She had asked Fournier to euthanize them, convinced she would have to abandon them.

Fournier held one of the cats as Thiele trained a needle toward its heart. While they worked, Fournier told Thiele she did not want to participate in putting patients out of their misery. Thiele told her he understood, and that he and others would handle it. She wasn’t sure what that meant.

Before Thiele could inject the heart-stopping medicine, potassium chloride, the cat struggled out of Fournier’s hands. It clawed at Thiele, ripping his sweaty scrub shirt. Someone else injected another cat and threw it out a broken window into the floodwaters.



Wednesday, January 29, 2014

former Atlanta Falcons linebacker Buddy Curry, the eleventh interview in Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



"It's a scary deal, because you don't know about the subconcussive hits. You don't know how these things could affect you, are going to affect you in the future. This kind of protein has been built up in these players' brains. It'll scare you to death. If you look at it that way, what you're doing is waiting."

the third interview in three with an idea towards two more between now and Super Bowl weekend. we'll see. but for now our conversation with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over concussions and other head injuries continues with former University of North Carolina and Atlanta Falcons linebacker Buddy Curry.

my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt nine)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

Around the time the police arrived, Dr. Anna Pou excused herself from the second-floor lobby to take a nap. She returned an hour later and shooed away the infectious diseases doctor, who was anxious and having stomach problems. Pou told her to go get some rest.

Pou found clean scrubs to change into each day, but she was drenched and dirty, and for the third night in a row, she worked on scarcely an hour’s sleep. She had assumed an attitude of blindness, navigating dark corridors with the run of fingers along humid walls and ascending invisible staircases by kicking the steps ahead as she went and counting. With several doctors and crews of nurses, she changed patients’ diapers and dipped rags into water to make cool compresses. She said prayers with anxious nurses whose faith in their skills was shaken.



Tuesday, January 28, 2014

former New England Patriots safety Doug Beaudoin, the tenth interview from Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



"The game I played, especially back in the secondary as a safety, you are a heat-seeking missile. You've got a great helmet on. You've got protection. You hit and destroy whatever moves. We were taught to use the helmet as a weapon."

yes, the pace has picked up a bit. maybe we're just excited about the Super Bowl (and if that's true then you can expect a few more this week), but our conversation with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over concussions and other head injuries continues with former New England Patriots safety Doug Beaudoin.

my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt eight)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

Despite how miserable the patients looked, Cook would later say he felt there was no way, in this crowded room, to do what he and Kokemor had discussed over cigars. “We didn’t do it because we had too many witnesses. That’s the honest-to-God truth.” A different memory of their interactions would be held by Kokemor, who would say he never talked about euthanasia, and, regardless, was not involved in hospital decision making.



Monday, January 27, 2014

former New Orleans Saints linebacker Bill Cody, the ninth interview from Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



"Just about two years ago I got in my car and I went to the wellness center. I go there every day. And I left the wellness center and—I don't know—15, 20 minutes later I pulled over and I called my wife and I said, 'I have no idea where I am.'"

our conversation with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over concussions and other head injuries continues with former Detroit Lions, New Orleans Saints and Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Bill Cody.

my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt seven)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

Cook sat on the emergency room ramp smoking cigars with another doctor, John Kokemor. The patients were lined up in wheelchairs or sitting before their walkers on mismatched chairs. In their similar blue-patterned hospital gowns, they reminded Cook of a church choir. Help was coming too slowly. There were too many people who needed to leave and weren’t going to make it. It was a desperate situation and Cook saw only two choices: quicken their deaths or abandon them. It had gotten to that point. You couldn’t just leave them. The humane thing seemed to be to put ‘em out.

Cook went to the staging area on the second floor, where Anna Pou and two other doctors were directing care. The area was broiling. Only some older wings of the hospital, built to be “productive of coolness” in the age before ubiquitous air-conditioning, had windows that opened. At first, some staff members had been warned they could be charged with destroying hospital property if they broke windows. Now, patients were moved back, and uniformed men and other eager volunteers crashed chairs, two-by-fours, and an oxygen tank through the tall glass panes into the surrounding moat, punishing the building that had failed to protect them.



Sunday, January 26, 2014

the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt six)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

Consigning certain sicker patients to go last has its risks, however. Predicting how a patient will fare is inexact and subject to biases. In one very small study of triage, experienced rescuers were asked to categorize the same patients and came up with widely different lists. Many patients who could have survived were mistakenly deemed unsalvageable by some rescuers. And patients’ conditions can change; more resources can become available to help those whose situations at first appear hopeless. The importance of reassessing each person is easy to forget once a ranking is assigned.

Designating a category of patients as beyond help creates the tragic possibility that a patient with a chance of survival will be miscategorized and left to die. To avoid this, some experts have concluded that patients seen to have little chance of survival must still be treated or evacuated—after those with severe injuries who need immediate attention to survive, but before those with significant injuries who can wait.

Pou and her colleagues had little if any training in triage systems and were not guided by any particular protocol. Pou viewed the sorting system they developed as heart-wrenching. To her, changing the evacuation order from sickest first to sickest last resulted from a sense among the doctors that they would not be able to save everyone.



Saturday, January 25, 2014

the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt five)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

Pou and her coworkers were performing triage, a word once used by the French in reference to the sorting of coffee beans and later applied to the battlefield by Napoleon Bonaparte’s chief surgeon, Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey. Triage came to be used in accidents and disasters when the number of those injured exceeded available resources. Surprisingly, perhaps, there was no consensus on how best to do this.

Concepts of triage and medical rationing are a barometer of how those in power in a society value human life. During World War II, the British military limited the use of scarce penicillin to pilots and bomber crews. Before lifesaving kidney dialysis became widely available in the United States, some hospital committees secretly factored age, gender, marital status, education, occupation, and “future potential” into treatment decisions to promote the “greatest good” for the community. When this practice attracted broader public attention in the 1960s, academics condemned one Seattle clinic for ruling out “creative non-conformists . . . [who] have historically contributed so much to the making of America. The Pacific Northwest is no place for a Henry David Thoreau with bad kidneys.”



Friday, January 24, 2014

the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt four)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

Burgess had taken up nursing to support her children after working jobs as various as taxi dispatcher and secretary to a mortician. But practicing nursing in mid-twentieth-century New Orleans had presented an unsettling paradox for a woman like Burgess with light-brown skin; she could care for patients at many of the private hospitals, but could not receive care at them. Though Jannie Burgess was born just a few months after Memorial opened in 1926 as Southern Baptist Hospital, it would be more than four decades before she could be a patient there.

In fact, Baptist was one of the last Southern hospitals to submit to integration. Medicare and other federal hospital programs were introduced in the mid-1960s, and hospitals were ineligible for reimbursements if they discriminated against or racially segregated patients. Baptist refused to join the programs. “It is our conviction,” a 1966 hospital statement said, “that we can serve all of the people better if we remain free of governmental entanglements that would dictate the terms and conditions under which this hospital shall be operated.”

New Orleanians sent supportive letters to the hospital’s administrator. “It’s heartening to realize that there are still some who do not succumb to the dictates of socialism,” one person wrote. “Congratulations,” wrote another, “on retaining the integrity of the hospital in the face of the ever growing pressure of the Federal government to take away the rights of the business and professional men of this nation.”



Thursday, January 23, 2014

the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt three)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

In the days since the storm, New Orleans had become an irrational and uncivil environment. It seemed to Thiele the laws of man and the normal standards of medicine no longer applied. He had no time to provide what he considered appropriate end-of-life care. He accepted the premise that the patients could not be moved and the staff had to go. He could not justify hanging a morphine drip and praying it didn’t run out after everyone left and before the patient died, following an interval of acute suffering. He could rationalize what he was about to do as merely abbreviating a normal process of comfort care—cutting corners—but he knew that it was technically a crime. It didn’t occur to him then to stay with the patients until they died naturally. That would have meant, he later said he believed, risking his life.



Wednesday, January 22, 2014

former NFL defensive end Jim Skow, the eighth interview from Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



"I remember the outside guard pulled, and when he pulled he actually dinged my head with his knee. It was pretty hard [laughs]. I remember standing on the sideline and the thought that came to my head: 'The kid that sat next to me in first grade's name was Paul Brown.' I had never remembered that, ever. Never [laughs]. And all of a sudden it came to me. I'm like, 'Yeah, that hit didn't do me any good.'"

our conversation with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over concussions and other head injuries continues with current lawyer and former Bengals, Buccaneers, Chargers, Rams and Seahawks defensive end Jim Skow.

my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt two)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

The first thing, he thought, was the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Thiele was Catholic and had been influenced by a Jesuit priest, Father Harry Tompson, a mentor who had taught him how to live and treat people. Thiele had also adopted a motto he had learned in medical school: “Heal Frequently, Cure Sometimes, Comfort Always.” It seemed obvious what he had to do, robbed of almost any control of the situation except the ability to offer comfort.

This would be no ordinary comfort, not the palliative care he had learned about in a week-long course that certified him to teach the practice of relieving symptoms in patients who had decided to prioritize this goal of treatment above all others.

There were syringes and morphine and nurses in this makeshift unit on the second-floor lobby. An intensive care nurse he had known for years, Cheri Landry, the “Queen of the Night Shift”—a short, broad-faced woman of Cajun extraction who had been born at the hospital—had, he believed, brought medications down from the ICU. Thiele knew why these medications were here. He agreed with what was happening. Others didn’t. The young internist who had helped him euthanize the cat refused to take part. He told her not to worry. He and others would take care of it.



Tuesday, January 21, 2014

the last book I ever read (Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, excerpt one)



from Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink:

Early Wednesday morning, Memorial’s generators failed, throwing the hospital into darkness and cutting off power to the machines that supported patients’ lives. Volunteers helped heft patients to staging areas for rescue, but helicopters arrived irregularly. That afternoon, Thiele sat on the emergency room ramp for a cigar break with an internist, Dr. John Kokemor, who told him doctors were being requested to leave last. When Thiele asked why, his friend brought an index finger to the crook of his opposite elbow and pantomimed giving an injection. Thiele caught his drift.

“Man, I hope we don’t come to that,” Thiele said. Kokemor would later say he never made the gesture, that he had spent nearly all his time outside the building loading hundreds of mostly able-bodied evacuees onto boats, which floated them over a dozen blocks of flooded streets to where they could wade to dry ground. He said he was no longer caring for patients and too busy to worry about what was going on inside the hospital.



Monday, January 20, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt sixteen)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

But who knows what Fabritius intended? There’s not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It’s not idealized or humanized. It’s very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There’s no moral or story. There’s no resolution. There’s only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.



Sunday, January 19, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt fifteen)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

After it was over, I sat on the carpet with my forehead resting on the sharp metal edge of the can and the kiddie-ballet music sparkling along irritatingly in the background: not even drunk, that was the hell of it, just sick. In the hallway I could hear a gaggle of Americans, couples, laughing, saying their loud goodbyes as they parted for their respective rooms: old college friends, jobs in the financial sector, five-plus years of corporate law and Fiona entering first grade in the fall, all’s well in Oaklandia, well goodnight then, God we love you guys, a life I might have had myself except I didn’t want it. That was the last thing I remember thinking before I made it swaying to my feet and switched the annoying music off and—stomach roiling—threw myself face down on the bed like throwing myself off a bridge, every lamp in the room still blazing as I sank away from the light, blackness closing over my head.



Saturday, January 18, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt fourteen)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

Blood smear on my cuff. Big fat drops.

“Trajectcontrole. That means some machine tells the police you are speeding. They drive unmarked cars, a lot of them, and sometimes they will follow a while before they stop you although—we are lucky—not much traffic out this way tonight. Weekend, I guess, and holiday. This is not exactly Happy Christmas neighborhood out here if you get me. You understand what just happened, don’t you?” said Boris, heaving for breath and scrubbing his nose hard with a gasping sound.

“No.” Somebody else talking, not me.



Friday, January 17, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt thirteen)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

“Well—he’s altogether charming. That is to say, he knows absolutely everyone . . . claims an Astor connection as well as the Washington Irving one, and who’s to say he is wrong? Some of us have found it interesting that many of the connections he invokes are dead. That said, Havistock’s delightful, or can be. Very very good about visiting the old ladies—well, you heard him just now. Perfect trove of information about New York history—dates, names, genealogies. Before you came up, he was filling me in on the history of every single building up and down the street—all the old scandals—society murder in the townhouse next door, 1870s—he knows absolutely everything. That said, at a luncheon a few months ago he was regaling the table with an utterly scurrilous story about Fred Astaire which I don’t feel can possibly be true. Fred Astaire! Cursing like a sailor, throwing a fit! Well, I don’t mind telling you that I simply didn’t believe it—none of us did. Chance’s grandmother knew Fred Astaire back when she was working in Hollywood and she said he was simply the loveliest man alive. Never heard a whisper to the contrary. Some of the old stars were perfectly horrible, of course, and we’ve heard all those stories too. “Oh,” she said despairingly, in the same breath, “how tired and hungry I feel.”

“Here--” feeling sorry for her, leading her to an empty chair—“sit down. Would you like me to get you something to eat?”



Thursday, January 16, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt twelve)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

Tiny table. My knee to her knee—was she aware of it? Quite as aware as I was? Bloom of the candle flame on her face, flame glinting metallic in her hair, hair so bright it looked about to catch fire. Everything blazing, everything sweet. They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old recover cover—because Pippa was exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he’s chosen to be happy with, and in fact that picture was an ideal of happiness in its way, the hike of his shoulders and the slightly embarrassed quality of her smile, that open-ended look like they might just wander off anywhere they wanted together, and—there she was! her! and she was talking about herself, affectionate and old-shoe, asking me about Hobie and the shop and my spirits and what I was reading and what I was listening to, lots and lots of questions but seeming anxious to share her life with me too, her chilly flat expensive to heat, depressing light and damp stale smell, cheap clothes on the high street and so many American chains in London now it’s like a shopping mall, and what meds are you on and what meds am I on (we both had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a malady that in Europe had different initials, it seemed, and got you sent to a hospital for Army vets if you weren’t careful); her tiny garden, which she shared with half a dozen people, and the batty Englishwoman who’d filled it with ailing tortoises she’d smuggled from the south of France (“they all die, of cold and malnutrition—it’s really cruel—she doesn’t feed them properly, crumbled bread, can you imagine, I buy them turtle food at the pet store without telling her”)—and how terribly she wanted a dog, but of course it was hard in London with the quarantine which they had in Switzerland too, how did she always end up living in all these dog-unfriendly places? and wow, I looked better than she’d seen me in years, she’d missed me, missed the hell out of me, what an amazing evening—and we’d been there for hours, laughing over little things but being serious too, very grave, she being both generous and receptive (this was another thing about her; she listened, her attention was dazzling—I never had the feeling that other people listened to me half as closely; I felt like a different person in her company, a better one, could say things to her I couldn’t say to anyone else, certainly not Kitsey, who had a brittle way of deflating serious comments by making a joke, or switching to another topic, or interrupting, or sometimes just pretending not to hear), and it was an utter delight to be with her, I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never.



Wednesday, January 15, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt eleven)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

I spent the rest of the film miserable, hardly seeing it. Or, rather, I was seeing it but in a wholly different way: not the ecstatic prodigy; not the mystic, the solitary, heroically quitting the concert stage at the height of his fame to retreat into the snows of Canada—but the hypochondriac, the recluse, the isolate. The paranoiac. The pill popper. No: the drug addict. The obsessive: glove-wearing, germ-phobic, bundled year round with scarves, twitching and racked with compulsions. The hunched nocturnal weirdo so unsure how to conduct even the most basic relations with people that in an interview which I was suddenly finding torturous) he had asked a recording engineer if they couldn’t go to a lawyer and legally be declared brothers—sort of the tragic, late-genius version of Tom Cable and me pressing cut thumbs in the darkened backyard of his house, or—even more strangely—Boris seizing my hand, bloody at the knuckles where I’d punched him on the playground, and pressing it to his own bloodied mouth.



Tuesday, January 14, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt ten)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

I didn’t start to breathe again until I was in my room with the door shut. My suit was okay, for yesterday’s, but my hair was dirty and I needed a shower. Should I shave? Change my shirt? Or would she notice? Would it look weird that I’d run in and tried to clean up for her? Could I get in the bathroom and brush my teeth without her noticing? But then suddenly I had a rush of counter-panic that I was sitting in my room with the door closed, wasting valuable moments with her.

I got up again and opened the door. “Hey,” I yelled down the hall.

Her head appeared again. “Hey.”

“Want to go to the movies with me tonight?”

Slight beat of surprise. “Well sure. What?”

“Documentary about Glenn Gould. Been dying to see it.” In fact I’d already seen it, and had sat in the theater the whole time pretending she was with me: imagining her reaction at various parts, imagining the amazing conversation we would have about it after.



Monday, January 13, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt nine)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

“Horst is usually a bit fussy about who he does business with, so I thought it would be okay. But—he is very restrained, you know? ‘Unusual’ is what he said. ‘Unconventional.’ Well what is that supposed to mean? Then when I get down there—these people are crazy. I mean like shooting-guns-at-chickens crazy. And situations like this—you want it calm and quiet! It was like, have they seen too much TV or something? like, this is how to act--? normally in this type situation everyone is very very polite, hush-hush, very peaceful! Myriam said—and she was right—forget about the guns! What kind of crazy thing is this for these people to keep chickens in Miami? Even a little thing like that—this is Jacuzzi neighborhood, tennis courts, you understand me—who keeps chickens? You don’t want a neighbor phoning in complaint because of chicken noise in the yard! But by that time--” he shrugged—“there I was. I was in. I told myself not to worry so much, but turned out I was right.”



Sunday, January 12, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt eight)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

Warm weary shop. I could not stay still; I stood up and sat down, walked to the window and back again. Everything was sodden with horror. A bisque Pulcinella eyed me with spite. Even the furniture looked sickly and disproportionate. How could I have believed myself a better person, a wiser person, a more elevated and valuable and worthy-of-living person on the basis of my secret uptown? Yet I had. The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow it apart.



Saturday, January 11, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt seven)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

“You know what I did in college?” I was telling him. “I took Conversational Russian for a year. Totally because of you. I did really sh*tty in it, actually. Never got good enough to read it, you know, to sit down with Eugene Onegin—you have to read it in Russian, they say, it doesn’t come through in translation. But—I thought of you so much! I used to remember little things you’d say—all sorts of things came back to me—oh, wow, listen, they’re playing ‘Comfy in Nautica,’ do you hear that? Panda Bear! I totally forgot that album. Anyway. I wrote a term paper on The Idiot for my Russian Literature class—Russian Literature in translation—I mean, the whole time I was reading it I thought about you, up in my bedroom smoking my dad’s cigarettes. It was so much easier to keep track of the names if I imagined you saying them in my head . . . actually, it was like I heard the whole book in your voice! Back in Vegas you were reading The Idiot for like six months, remember? In Russian. For a long time it was all you did. Remember how for a long time you couldn’t go downstairs because of Xandra, I had to bring you food, it was like Anne Frank? Anyway, I read it in English, The Idiot, but I wanted to get there too, to that point, you know, where my Russian was good enough. But I never did.”



Friday, January 10, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt six)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

We went back and forth a few times until I began to feel much more optimistic about the future and things in general. And as we stood rubbing our noses and jabbering in the street, Popper looking up at us curiously, the wonderfulness of New York seemed right on the tip of my tongue, an evanescence possible to convey. “I mean, it’s great,” I said. The words were spiraling and tumbling out of me. “Really, you have to come. We can go to Brighton Beach—that’s where all the Russians hang out. Well, I’ve never been there. But the train goes there—it’s the last stop on the line. There’s a big Russian community, restaurants with smoked fish and sturgeon roe. My mother and I always talked about going out there to eat one day, this jeweler she worked with told her the good places to go, but we never did. It’s supposed to be great. Also, I mean—I have money for school—you can go to my school. No—you totally can. I have a scholarship. Well, I did. But the guy said as along as the money in my fund was used for education—it could be anybody’s education. Not just mine. There’s more than enough for both of us. Though, I mean, public school, the public schools are good in New York, I know people there, public school’s fine with me.”



Thursday, January 9, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt five)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

The dark-haired boy scowled and sank deeper in his seat. He reminded me of the homeless-looking kids who stood around passing cigarettes back and forth on St. Mark’s Place, comparing scars, begging for change—same torn-up clothes and scrawny white arms; same black leather bracelets tangled at the wrists. Their multi-layered complexity was a sign I couldn’t read, though the general import was clear enough: different tribe, forget about it, I’m way too cool for you, don’t even try to talk to me. Such was my mistaken first impression of the only friend I made when I was in Vegas, and—as it turned out—one of the great friends of my life.



Wednesday, January 8, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt four)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

I said nothing. Clearly he had never met Grandpa Decker and Dorothy. Though I hadn’t been around them very much myself, the main thing I remembered was the complete absence of blood feeling between us, the opaque way they looked at me as if I was some random kid who’d wandered over from the mall. The prospect of going to live with them was almost literally unimaginable and I’d been racking my brains trying to remember what I could about my last visit to their house—which wasn’t very much, as I’d been only seven or eight years old. There had been hand-stitched sayings framed and hanging on the walls, a plastic countertop contraption that Dorothy used to dehydrate foods in. At some point—after Grandpa Decker had yelled at me to keep my sticky little mitts off his train set—my dad had gone outside for a cigarette (it was winter) and not come back inside the house. “Jesus God,” my mother had said, once we were out in the car (it had been her idea that I should get to know my father’s family), and after that we never went back.



Tuesday, January 7, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt three)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

After four days, or maybe it was five, Andy loaded his books in his stretched-out backpack and returned to school. All that day, and the next, I sat in his room with his television turned to Turner Classic Movies, which was what my mother watched when she was home from work. They were showing movies adapted from Graham Greene: Ministry of Fear, The Human Factor, The Fallen Idol, This Gun for Hire. That second evening, while I was waiting for The Third Man to come on, Mrs. Barbour (all Valentino-ed up and on her way out the door to an event at the Frick) stopped by Andy’s room and announced that I was going back to school the next day. “Anybody would feel out of sorts,” she said. “Back here by yourself. It isn’t good for you.”

I didn’t know what to say. Sitting around on my own watching movies was the only thing I’d done since my mother’s death that had felt even vaguely normal.



Monday, January 6, 2014

the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt two)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

As she turned to greet us, I could feel the social workers taking in the apartment, and her. Mrs. Barbour was from a society family with an old Dutch name, so cool and blonde and monotone that sometimes she seemed partially drained of blood. She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty—a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room. Like a fashion drawing come to life, she turned heads wherever she went, gliding along obliviously without appearing to notice the turbulence she created in her wake; her eyes were spaced far apart, her ears were small, high-set, and very close to her head, and her body was long-waisted and thin, like an elegant weasel’s. (Andy had these features as well, but in ungainly proportions, without her slinky ermine grace.)



Sunday, January 5, 2014

a kind of emblematic anniversary



all this talk of the Packers and playoff football and cold, cold, cold (really cold) weather brings "The Ice Bowl" to mind.

and from there it's only one more icy step (at least on the sidewalks of New York this morning) to my interview with former Green Bay Packers Pro Bowler Jerry Kramer.

(Mr. Kramer is also the co-author of Instant Replay, perhaps the greatest football book ever written)



the last book I ever read (The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, excerpt one)



from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch:

I could have killed him. Nervously, I glanced at the empty doorway. Then I dug my hands deeper in my pockets and—face burning—walked conspicuously across the length of the gallery. The clock was ticking; my mother would be back any second; and though I knew I didn’t have the nerve to barge up and actually say something, I could at the very least get a good look at her. Not long before, I had stayed up late with my mother and watched Citizen Kane, and I was very taken with the idea that a person might notice in passing some bewitching stranger and remember her for the rest of his life. Somebody I too might be like the old man in the movie, leaning back in my chair with a far-off look in my eyes, and saying: “You know, that was sixty years ago, and I never saw that girl with the red hair again, but you know what? Not a month has gone by in all that time when I haven’t thought of her.”

I was more than halfway across the gallery when something strange happened. A museum guard ran across the open doorway of the exhibition shop beyond. He was carrying something in his arms.

The girl saw it, too. Her golden-brown eyes met mine: a startled, quizzical look.

Suddenly another guard flew out of the museum shop. His arms were up and he was screaming.



Saturday, January 4, 2014

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt eighteen)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

I was a mess. I had cold sores all over my mouth from doing coke. I was grossly overweight and now I had this pinched nerve. Meanwhile, Kiki had done all the wedding bullsh*t. She was superstitious, so for something blue she put on blue panties. For something borrowed, she was wearing her mom’s bracelet. She had plenty of old stuff so that was no biggie. We got to the chapel and I couldn’t believe that the guy that was marrying us looked just like Slick, the black pro-wrestling manager who managed Big Boss Man. We both looked so bad that we didn’t even want pictures but then we broke down and got some. We started looking through the pictures and the guy that married us said, “That will be a donation of seventy-five dollars and up.” How do you come off setting the price for a donation? I felt like he was getting ready to call the law on us like we were going to run off with the pictures.



Friday, January 3, 2014

Billy Davis's Greatest Game



"When I go back to Clemson that's who I'm known as. I'm not known as Billy Davis, the Secret Service agent, or Billy Davis, the baseball player. I'm known as Billy Davis, the guy who returned the punt in the Orange Bowl. And I am totally fine with that."

We take a break from our regularly scheduled concussion interviews, while staying in the neighborhood of former NFL players, to talk to Secret Service agent Billy Davis from Clemson University's first and only national championship team.

My thanks, as always, to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to Special Agent Davis for the time and conversation.



the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt seventeen)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

In a couple of weeks I was on the set of The Hangover. I was fat, out of shape, and moody. But Todd Phillips, the director, and those actors were just so awesome. I don’t know if they thought I was going to be some psycho on the set but Todd and the producers were all over me all the time.

“Is everything okay? Do you want to take a break?” Todd said. “Can you do one more take now? You don’t have to do it now if you don’t want to.”

I was just so happy to work. I had been asking God to just give me another chance and I would never get high again, even though I couldn’t stop using coke. I was high on coke the entire time we shot The Hangover. I had one of my hooker girlfriends with me on the set. And then Seano stopped in to see the filming. He took one look at my girl’s ass and shook his head.

“I can see that me and the brothers are not on your mind too often these days, huh, Mike?” he said.



Thursday, January 2, 2014

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt sixteen)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

I was getting a lot of life skills from those meetings. I really changed my whole outlook on the way I relate to women. I never thought I was a sex addict. Being the champ, I thought that having sex with all those women was just a perk. You’re supposed to have all those willing bodies around you. All the people I worshipped were sexual conquerors. I used to read about Errol Flynn, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, all these great people, and what they all had in common was their conquests over women. So I always thought in order to be a great figure you had to have women in your life, and the more women you conquer, the greater the figure you were. I never knew that having sex with so many women takes so much from you, more than what it adds. I never really created my own self-image, so I read about a lot of people who I believed were great men and I took qualities from them. I was too young to know that these were great men that had bad qualities. Even Cus would have a “real man”-oriented mentality. But all that sex only brought me gonorrhea, chlamydia, and all those other scientific-named diseases.