Here Comes the Taxman
The first few weeks of the spring semester of his junior year had passed in a blur. Without football to keep him occupied, Caesar found himself getting bored more often than not. And there was only so much extra training someone could do before they risked fucking something up. Even taskmaster Deion Jenkins knew that.
The problem was that bored Caesar was synonymous with horny Caesar.
“I just don’t understand what’s the problem. I don’t think that she’s that much prettier than me and she doesn’t seem that nice. And that friend of hers is a bitch. I just don’t see how all of that fits together to even be remotely attractive. Don’t you think?”
Caesar picked his shirt up off the floor and tugged it over his head. “I don’t know and I really, really, really don’t fucking care, Scarlett. If you were that bitch ass motherfucker, would you take you back if you knew that you’d been getting fucked by me?”
“Well, no, but we’ve only had sex three times. That’s not a lot... is it?” Scarlett asked.
“It’s a lot more than zero. You need me to walk you out or you think you can manage it?”
“You know I’m not going to walk through your house alone. What if your parents are downstairs? Do you know what they’d think of me?”
He sighed and stood up. “Not any more or less than they think of any other girl that they see in here with me, I’m sure. Let’s go.”
The two of them made the trek from Caesar’s room to the front door downstairs; Scarlett trying to keep Caesar in front of her to block any direction someone could see her from.
It was all for naught.
Caesar’s mother passed by at the bottom of the stairs and glanced up at the two of them.
“When you walk your friend out, Caesar, your father has something that he wants to tell us,” she said. She stopped before walking toward the living room and stepped back. She sighed. “I would tell you to go put on something else because your grandparents are here but we’ve already waited long enough.”
Caesar looked back at Scarlett who blushed and all but ran out of the door, pausing only briefly to close it without it slamming behind her. Caesar looked down at his attire of an old Vandebilt weights shirt and a pair of basketball shorts, shrugged and walked into the living room where his family were waiting.
His mother and his grandmother sat next to one another on one side of the room. Grandpa Marcus sat with his feet cocked up on the coffee table, probably the only person who could get away with that. His father stood next to the, now-repaired, window.
“Alright, I’m here. What’s up?” Caesar asked.
“You’re going to knock one of those little fast ass white girls up if you don’t watch yourself,” his grandfather said, wagging an admonishing finger at Caesar.
He scratched the side of his face. “Grandpa, I wouldn’t be here if you would’ve been watching yourself.”
Marcus Jenkins looked at his wife of many decades who only shook her head at the man’s comment. “Hm. I guess you’re right about that. That doesn’t mean you have go do what your daddy and I did. Save yourself for marriage, boy. It’s good for your kidneys.”
“My kidneys?”
“Don’t listen to that crazy old man,” Cassie, his grandmother, said. “I’m already thinking about donating his brain to science when he dies because there isn’t any way that he doesn’t have CTE or something.”
“I think the same thing about Deion,” Candice added.
Deion looked up from his phone before stashing the device in his pocket. He walked over to stand before his family. “So, I’m going to cut right to the point because there isn’t any reason to drag this conversation out.”
“We already know your dick don’t work, son. That’s why you only got one kid when I told you to have two or three,” Marcus said, laughing at his own joke.
Candice reached for a glass of amber liquid, probably whiskey, on the table and downed it in one gulp. It wasn’t later than 10 in the morning.
“Anyway,” Deion said, ignoring the insult. “I just wanted to tell you all, that it hasn’t been announced just yet but I’m going to be included in this year’s Hall of Fame class. First year on the ballot, baby!”
Caesar watched as his father hugged his parents and then his wife, all of them congratulating him on being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Caesar walked up last to congratulate him.
Deion put his hand on the back of Caesar’s neck, a wide grin on his face. “Boy, you thought you were going to have it tough carrying the Jenkins name with two All-Pros coming before you, but now you gotta live up to being the son of a Hall of Famer, huh?!” He pushed on Caesar’s shoulder. “Hope you ready to carry this name on your back. It ain’t one to be sullied!”
Caesar chuckled, but he could already feel the weight of the next football season, starting weeks after his father was inducted into the Hall of Fame, starting to weigh on him. Before, he was just Caesar Jenkins, the grandson and son of Super Bowl champions. Now, he was going to be Caesar Jenkins, son of a Hall of Famer.
And he was already struggling to keep pace with the expectations.
“We’re going to Canton!” his father shouted as he and his grandfather left the living room, likely in search of some celebratory booze.
Candice must have noticed her son’s face because she wrapped her arm around his shoulders – as best she could given their massive difference in height – and walked him out of the room.
“You know you should bring someone with you when we go to Canton for all this Hall of Fame bullshit so you don’t have to sit around and listen to a bunch of old men remember their glory days,” she said.
“Oh yeah?”
She nodded. “Yep. Ask Kaley. I think she was much better for you than those last few girls I’ve seen you hanging around with these last few weeks.”
“We aren’t dating, ma.”
“Only because you’re a man and men are stupid and blind,” she said, shaking the empty glass in her hand. “I’ll let you drink this one day to celebrate your father.”
“You already know that I drink.”
Candice shrugged. “Sometimes, I like to believe that we have a normal family life where I’d send you to your room for that so let me have it.”
“Alright, ma.”
-*****-
Devin hopped out of his car still running and jogged around to the passenger side. Opening the door, he grabbed a few bags of groceries from the floor before kicking it closed and jogging to the front door of his grandparents’ house.
He tested the doorknob to find it locked so he stepped onto the cement planter next to the door and grabbed the extra key from the side of the porch light. He wasn’t sure why his grandparents kept it there given that it was unlikely that either of them still had the leg strength to stand on a planter and grab the key without falling.
He maneuvered the bags and unlocked the door, calling out for his grandparents as he stepped inside the house.
His grandmother, Janice, shuffled around the corner, looking more haggard than usual as she smiled at him. “I didn’t hear you pull up, sweetie. Thanks for bringing us all of this. I hope that it wasn’t too much hassle.”
“No, I worked the early shift this morning so it wasn’t. I just have to go and pick up my girlfriend because we were going to hang out,” he said, trying to say that he needed to leave without saying as much.
“Well, at least let me make you a sandwich or something to take with you to thank you because we could’ve just got this delivered instead.”
Devin nodded, knowing that he didn’t really spend too much time with his family and letting his grandmother make him food wasn’t too much of an ask. “Yeah, a ham sandwich would be great. Thanks, grandma.”
He followed her as she, slowly, shuffled her way back into the kitchen. It seemed like his grandparents aged faster than other people’s. But they’d lived a hard life considering so maybe it wasn’t all that much of a surprise.
His grandfather sat at the kitchen table with a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose with an old laptop in front of him. The man needed more than readers, but he was too stubborn to admit so instead he enlarged the text on the screen.
“Thanks for the groceries, boy. I hope it didn’t run you too much,” the man said as he pecked at the keys, likely from not being able to find them than any lack of ability to use a computer.
“Nope. I had it covered.”
“Good. I would’ve told you that this was the perfect reason why you need to stop turning it down when the recruiters try to hand you a little money on the slick. You can get paid off your likeness you know.”
“Isn’t there paperwork that comes with that? And don’t you have to already be in college?”
“Don’t mean you can’t take the money. They ain’t worried about what happens to you so you shouldn’t be worried about that dumbass shit. Just tell them that you need to feed your kids or something and they’ll give you a little extra.”
“I don’t have any kids.”
“Lie, dumbass.”
“Don’t call him that and don’t tell him to do that,” his grandmother said as she grabbed the loaf of bread out of one of the bags that Devin had brought. “We only have Zapp’s. I know you really don’t like those.”
“No, that’s fine. I don’t want to make too much trouble,” Devin said as he sat at the bar. He looked at his grandfather. The man’s face was almost pressed to the computer screen and he was still squinting his eyes. “You seeing alright over there, grandpa?”
“I got 20/20, boy. I can see well enough to shoot the dick off a mosquito,” he said, sitting back away from the screen. “I’m trying to read this shit about filing taxes and I’m remembering why I never do this shit. You know taxes is the government way of stealing from the people. We ain’t ask for this shit so I ain’t paying it.”
“Isn’t that kinda illegal?”
“I ain’t paid no taxes since when I was in the league. They ain’t say nothing yet, they ain’t going to say nothing.”
“We need to pay it,” Janice said. “I’m tired of worrying about that every year.”
“You ain’t worried about nothing, woman. You don’t make no money.”
“We need to pay the taxes!”
Devin was taken aback by the outburst. He couldn’t remember a time, if ever, that he’d heard his grandmother raise her voice. He looked between his grandparents, feeling like he should probably leave but not knowing what to do.
“Don’t you see that’s what I’m trying to do!” Devin, Jr. shouted back. “If my son wasn’t such a little pussy and had one athletic bone in his body, I could be free of this shit right now and it’d all be paid for.” He looked at Devin. “Hopefully, you know what family mean.”
“Yeah, grandpa.” He didn’t. “Why don’t you just take that to an accountant or something? Or one of those tax preparers?”
“I ain’t let none of these rich white people look at my shit. They’ll say ‘oh, you been hiding something and now we gotta tell Bob, Billy and Mary.’ Fuck that. All this shit ain’t for nothing but for them fat cats in Washington to line their pockets. You remember that when you get to the league. Don’t trust none of ‘em. They don’t care about you.”
Devin nodded and turned to his grandmother, who was putting the sandwich in a plastic bag along with a handful of chips. She held it out to him with a smile.
“Thanks, grandma,” he said, taking it from her and standing up.
“No, thank you for bringing our groceries,” she said.
He waved goodbye to his grandpa who grumbled a goodbye as he had gone back to trying to make out the print on the computer screen.
Devin jogged out of the house to get back to his car, but stopped when he sat in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t too knowledgeable about tax laws, but if his grandpa hadn’t paid taxes since he was in the NFL that would be almost four decades of tax evasion. He shuddered at the thought of the IRS finding out about something like that.
Putting it out of his mind, he closed the door and pulled out of the driveway. That was a topic of worry for a different day.