A Flawed Pro on a Wild Search for Pay Dirt

Wide receiver Zelmont Raines once caught the winning pass in a Super Bowl, but his glory years are fading. He is getting old, has a bad hip and had to play last season in Spain for $17,000 a game. The opening of a new NFL franchise in Los Angeles is his last chance to “live large” again. If he can impress the coaches as a walk-on and play a year or two before he retires, he can recoup some of the millions he squandered.

“Time was,” Raines thinks as he takes a taxi from LAX, “there’d be a limo waiting for me, Courvoisier on a rack in the back, and maybe some mama with pouty red lips warming up the leather seat.” At his mansion in the Hollywood Hills, there’d be the drugs and friends the millions bought and endless parties.

Most of that is gone now, and Raines knows it’s his fault. Not that he intends to change his ways. But he’ll be a little more careful this time. “The Jook” is a departure for Gary Phillips, a Los Angeles community activist whose previous novels featured African American private-eye Ivan Monk, a man with a well-developed social conscience. Raines is different. On the field, he’s a professional, but off it he’s just a big kid, slave to appetites that have swollen beyond reason.

He still has the house, though the mortgage is killing him. He still has a girlfriend, Davida, though he no longer can afford to bankroll her would-be singing career. He still has his NFL pension, though that isn’t enough to finance his dreams, and he has to auction off his Super Bowl ring to pay child support to a groupie and to cover lawyer bills in a statutory-rape case involving a girl in a wheelchair.

To Raines, what he still has isn’t enough, and Phillips’ challenge is to make us agree. As Raines works out with the new team, the Barons, fights the pain in his hip, smokes crack, shakes down ex-pals who owe him, makes nice to the NFL’s new commissioner, and meets smart, shapely Wilma Wells, it’s a race against time: Get signed before the last of the money runs out. And we root for him in spite of ourselves.

Why?

First, Raines was a poor kid; then, suddenly, he was rich. Like the football players in “Semi-Tough” and “North Dallas Forty,” he has inhaled the American Dream in a particularly potent and addictive form. Forced withdrawal is more painful than the longings of those who never had a whiff.

Second, Raines is an innocent compared with the commissioner, the money men who put together the Barons franchise, and the neo-Nazis and Serbian gangsters they employ for the dirty work. Raines has done harm--plenty of it--but never really meant harm, a crucial difference. When he is unfairly denied a spot on the roster and joins a plot to “jook,” or scam, the bad guys out of a truckload of cash, he seems almost justified.

We may miss the rough-edged integrity and the historical perspective of Phillips’ last book, “Bad Night Is Falling,” a story of life in L.A. after the Watts riots. But “The Jook” is his fastest and most seamless novel yet, energized by Raines’ first-person narration. It’s a thrill ride of sex and violence--less a realistic story than a dream sequence, the dream of an unlikely Everyman juking and faking and running, desperately, for daylight.