Anyway, I was happy to be out from under the sobriquet, Team Gorlock. The name was Skip's idea. He's a devotee of "The Colbert Report." Gorlock, a character on the show, is Stephen Colbert's lawyer.
Since I was playing alone against five other teams, I chose the moniker Frankie Machine in honor of one of Chicago's greatest authors. That was the lead character's name in Nelson Algren's book, "The Man with the Golden Arm."
I quickly found myself firmly ensconced in second place. Here's a sample question: What do Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, and Sonny Liston have in common? (Answer at the end of the post.)
I sat next to a garrulous young couple - a pretty woman and her athletic-looking partner. She'd struck up a conversation with me before the game started, asking about the crossword puzzle I was doing while I waited. She proceeded to tell me her name was Natasha, that she was an accountant, that she'd been born in Guyana, that she was highly ambitious, and that she'd lived in Orlando, Florida until recently.
Natasha asked me what I do. When she learned I'm a writer a lightbulb flashed on over her head. "Do you write biographies?" she asked.
"I'll write anything as long as the money's right."
"Have you ever heard of Dee Brown?"
The name sounded familiar. I remembered that Dee Brown had written "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," one of the seminal consciousness-raising Native American books of the 1970s. "Yeah," I said, "I think so."
She pointed a thumb at her escort and said, "Here he is."
I recoiled a bit. Dee Brown, I figured, ought to be pushing 100. Natasha noted my puzzlement.
"You know, Dee Brown," she said. "The basketball player. He won the Slam Dunk Contest in 1991."
"Oh yeah," I said, but not too convincingly. The fellow appeared too callow to be even the younger Dee Brown.
A few moments later, I pressed Natasha, "So he's really Dee Brown the basketball player?"
"Of course he is! Why would I lie? Do I look like a liar?"
I don't know what a liar looks like but I do know Dee Brown was a star for the Boston Celtics in the 90s. Natasha introduced me to him with the preamble that I was a fine writer and would like to write a biography of him. I was about to say I'd expressed no such desire when the fellow clasped my hand eagerly and began telling me he was in Louisville to start up a basketball camp for youngsters. "Write a story about me," he said, handing me his card. "Anything you can do will help."
He and Natasha decided to play Trivia. They called themselves Royal Crown. Skip insisted on calling them Royal Clown. During the first round, I moaned out loud about the difficulty of the questions. "They ain't so hard," the fellow said. "I got at least six out of ten."
"Six out of ten! You're shitting me," I blurted. I figured I'd answered only four correctly.
"Damn," he said. "This is easy."
Skip then announced the first round scores. The fellow and Natasha had answered only two correctly. "Aw, man!" the fellow moaned.
When the game was over, I'd finished in second place while Royal Crown was second to last. Still, the fellow pranced around the room high-fiving people.
And then, like that, the couple left. Someone told Jason the Bartender that the fellow was Dee Brown. Jason, a basketball fanatic, tilted his head. "Yeah?' he said. "Didn't look like him."
My mind immediately flashed to a story I'd read in the papers last fall. A New Jersey man was arrested after spending the summer telling people he was the New York Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain. Apparently, his summer was packed with free drinks and food and more sex than he'd ever had before. The man was charged with criminal simulation and theft of services.
I fingered this Dee Brown fellow's card. Could he be the real thing? I'll let you know in a future post.
(Trivia answer: all three appeared on the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover.)
