Junior Seau 3: The NFL Pays No Taxes

Jim drives, fast, on the highway, blasting “Man in the Box” by Alice in Chains. But Jim is forced to decelerate, taps his breaks as he passes a wreck, what looks like a huge pileup. Traffic then clogs like a stuffed pipe and all he can see in the horizon is taillights.

Flicking his gaze to the wreckage, he notices that a highway sign nearby reads: “Death 23.” A nausea ripples in the pit of his stomach.

A worse, more foreboding feeling overtakes him when he sees what resembles his daughter’s car among the debris of the wreck. Inching forward in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, Jim rubbernecks, fixes his squinted eyes on the license plate jutting from the crumpled mess of the vehicle. It reads: “LOSER.”

Jim is dizzy. A smack of vertigo causes his body to buckle, washes over him like a slow-breaking wave. He taps his brakes, then creeps forward in the crawling traffic. Over the din of Jerry Cantrell’s down-tuned guitar and ambient sounds of car horns and idling engines, Jim hears a familiar voice again.

It’s Junior.

“A human life. It’s a collection of moments, right? Say you have 80 years, that’s about 29,200 days; that’s 700,800 hours; 42,048,000 minutes; 2,522,880,000 seconds.

“Me, I lived 43 years, so that’s roughly 22,600,800 minutes. God as my calculator ... The Bible is my textbook...”

“A collection of minutes. A scrapbook, brother. I never made a deal with the devil. Did you?”

Jim groans. He wants to vomit. He looks back in the rearview, doesn’t see Junior, but still hears his voice.

Then he sees Junior next to him, sitting in the passenger seat; blunted sunlight slanting in through the tinted windows, Jim understands the top of Junior’s head is missing, cut ear to ear. Junior’s skull is hollow, like an empty bowl.

“Please, see that my brain is given to the NFL brain bank, BUDDEE!” Junior chortles and says in a mock Pauly Shore voice.

Jim scoffs, flicks his gaze back to the road, the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“Damn, brother, a flying car would be rad right now. It’s the 2020s and no flying cars? What a disappointing decade,” Junior grumbles, then points his swollen, scarred hand at the stereo, begins to play Hawaiian music, heavy on the ukulele.

“The headaches? They got you too? I wanted to shoot myself in the head,” Junior then hums to the ukulele plucking and sings, in an off-key cry, “Turn from the Bible with a bottle in my hand, wooooooooooooo!!”

Junior’s face twists in a contorted mass of anger, and he seethes, snarls at Jim, speaks in a voice of cruel truth, “It’s what you’re doing, brother. ‘Cept it’s that orange bottle. It’s those pills you been eating like candy. Who you think you’re fooling? You think they weren’t gonna find out the proposal tanked? You blew the cash?”

“Let’s fly,” Junior growls, and the car lifts off the ground, hovering over the traffic, flying like a helicopter, soaring slowly, over the congestion of the highway. The car’s engine roaring with a low guttural rumble as it ascends...

Junior giggles as golden sunlight dapples in from the windshield, luminating his heavy face, and he nods down at the highway below, “This is why Kobe liked helicopters. Rush hour traffic, right?