Page 38 of Kiss Me Tonight

The Golden Fleece after it’s been ransacked by football parents.

“. . . AndthenI told Suzy to lay off the Cheetos before she starts pooping orange. She cried. I felt like a horrible dad and caved. Next thing I know, she’s the happiest three-year-old on the planet, smashing Cheetos into her face like she’s on the verge of starvation . . .”

“. . . Naked boobs, Josh. You know how horrifying it is to walk into a room and see your son doingthatto the daughter of a friend of yours? I screamed. Craig screamed. She screamed. We’re all scarred . . .”

“If he takes my car one more time without asking, he’s grounded until he’s so old, he’ll have gray hairs coming out of his nose.”

The scene before me is like a PTA meeting on steroids, and though I know I should be mingling and introducing myself, my ass has been parked in a booth for the last ten minutes and counting.

Where the hell is Levi?

This meeting was her brilliant idea.

“We’re both new to the school,” she told me yesterday after practice, “so we really should make an effort to introduce ourselves and let the parents get to know us.”

Except that our peppy headcoach is nowhere to be found, and I’m slowly beginning to suspect that I’ll be forced to handle this shindig alone.

Looking at the impending clusterfuck objectively, nothing about this event is out of my realm of expertise. I spent four years faking smiles on TV for millions of people every week. Before that, when I played for the Bucs, I spearheaded a new, team-led charity where each player—myself included—mentored a child in foster care. Junior Buccaneers was a cause close to my heart, but I made the tough decision to pass the director role to another one of my teammates after I retired from the league.

The mission of the charity was always to cut out the trustee boards and all the inner-politics that inevitably comes from having too many mouths shouting their respective opinions.

Player-led.

That was the goal.

And when I wasn’t a player anymore, I gave someone else the chance to do something good, something that makes a difference in a way most people will never understand.

What’s the difference, then, between founding a charity and talking to a bunch of parents?

Expectations.

No, that’s not it.

I take a drag from my beer bottle.

The difference is simple: I understood the kids who came through Junior Buccaneers. A long time ago, Iwasthat kid. I never had a mom or a dad—not a set who played an influential role in my life, at any rate—and being shuffled from house to house meant that I never stuck around long enough to feel largely impacted by the women and men who took me in, either.

I’m a fish trying to swim on solid ground.

Doesn’t mean that I can’t do my best with what I’ve got.

I drain the rest of my Bud Light, then slide out of the booth.

Shawn, the bartender who I met last week, is hustling hard tonight behind the bar. Parents swarm him like locusts, no doubt feverish at the thought of being kid-free for an evening. Conversation closes in on me from all sides as I maneuver my way through the dense crowd.

“. . . I heard Dominic DaSilva is the new assistant coach . . .”

“. . . Oh, my God, did you see him two nights ago on that dating show? Girl, Ilivefor the drama. When he punched that other guy, I swear my ovaries exploded . . .”

“. . . What the hell was the athletic director thinking, bringing in a guy like him? Yeah, he’s good on the field, but I hear he’s a complete asshole . . .”

My molars grind together as I fight the urge to sayfuck thisand head home.

Playing for the NFL isn’t at all like being a celebrity. For the most part, my reputation when I played for Tampa Bay was mostly hearsay. Even when I worked for Sports 24/7, the mass media didn’t give a shit about me. Certainly nothing I ever said or did made headline news and landed me on the front page of every gossip rag in the country.

Then I went onPut A Ring On It.

Old tweets began to resurface. Old flings came out of the woodwork to reveal their side of our breakups to online gossip sites likeCosmoand, the worst of them all, the anonymously runCelebrity TeaPresents. Old acquaintances suddenly had an opinion as to why I behaved a certain way on one episode and acted completely different a week later.

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