“Guys,” said Coach Monroe. “I’d like you to meet Rick Oldcorn. The one and only.”
This Oldcorn was as huge as I’d always imagined, but bald, with muttonchop whiskers and a gut that buried his belt. He wore cop shades, a T-shirt for a titty bar. He looked like a Jackson, or what I figured a Jackson would look like if I ever really saw one. Maybe I never would.
“You guys are shit,” said Oldcorn, “but what can you do with a jackass like Monroe for a coach?”
“Thanks, pal,” said Coach Monroe, and his smile said it all, though I wasn’t exactly sure what it said.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Oldcorn.
“Do you want beer?” said Merk.
“I want all the beer in your town,” said Oldcorn. “And I want teen poot, if that’s available. Let’s ride.”
We piled into Coach Monroe’s pickup. Oldcorn followed on his bike. Soon we sat in Merk’s uncle’s basement drinking beer and sword fighting with cue sticks. It was fun for a while. Fun was important.
“You guys want a bump?” said Oldcorn, pulling out a small packet.
“Do your arm!” said Fred Powler.
Oldcorn grinned, popped his shoulder out of its socket, popped it back.
Then Merk’s uncle came down with more beer.
“We can do whatever we want,” he announced, “as long as we stay in the basement.”
Soon he was crooning into a spatula.
Fred Powler lay down on the pool table. “Lost ambition,” he said. “For cars.”
Slivers of puke clung to his lip.
Merk carried his uncle up to bed. Coach Monroe slumped in the corner. Oldcorn and I sat at the bar with our beers. It felt like a place I would be for a long time to come.
“Why did you walk off the field in the trials for Montreal?” I said.
“I met this chick,” he said.
“Oh.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. It all got damn depressing. Going from town to town just to throw a metal ball around. Seemed silly.”
“Put,” I said. “Not throw.”
“Jesus, kid,” said Oldcorn. “Don’t be one of those guys.”
“But you were the best in the world,” I said.
“Damn straight I was,” said Oldcorn. “So you can imagine the scope of my depression.”
“Up yours,” said a voice behind us. “Up yours, Oldcorn.”
Coach Monroe steadied himself on a beer lamp, rose.
“Hey, good buddy,” said Oldcorn. “Welcome back.”
“Up yours, you, buddy,” said Coach Monroe. His eyes had wet, pulsing rims.
“Oldcock,” said Coach Monroe.
“Watch it, now,” said Oldcorn.
“Oldfuck.”
It was all pretty quick. Coach Monroe had a beer bottle he was maybe thinking of cracking over Oldcorn’s head. Next thing he was on his knees, pawing for his nose through the blood on his face.
Oldcorn rubbed his fist.
“Tell that other kid thanks for the beer.”
I heard his bike start up on the gravel drive.
* * *
I do not know if Oldcorn found any teen poot that night. It might not have been so available. We heard nothing about him and did not speak of him again.
Coach Monroe wore gauze on his nose for the rest of the year. He went on to marry Mindy Richter’s mother.
Merk went off to the war. I haven’t talked to him since graduation, when we all walked down the stadium steps in our nylon robes and got certificates for being alive and living in New Jersey—all of us except Fred Powler, who didn’t quite qualify, but who waved to us from the grass.
I wish there was some other story that could make you feel better about Fred Powler, but he clubbed his father with a chair leg and had to go to some kind of home. Chief Powler claimed it was an accident, which I’m sure it was.
Everything in this life, with the exception of snowrocks, is an accident.
I live in the city now. There are so many kinds of people here, and sometimes they look at me funny, like I’ve just come down from a shack on a mountain. But I’ve got a studio apartment. There’s just enough room for some good spins on the hardwood. I’ll spend Sunday morning being Bucky Schmidt, or the Oldcorn of Mexico, gun grapefruits into the wall. My last girlfriend used to get pissed when I did this, plus they were her grapefruits, but what the hell, she was over me anyway.
THIS APPOINTMENT OCCURS in the PAST
Davis called, told me he was dying.
He said his case was—here was essence of Davis—time sensitive.
“Come visit,” he said. “Bid farewell to the ragged rider.”
“You?” I said. “The cigarette hater? That’s just wrongness.”
“Nonetheless, brother, come.”
“Who was that?” said Ondine, my ex-mother-in-law. I kissed her cream-goldened shoulder, slid out of bed.
“A sick friend. I’ve known him twenty years, more, since college. I might have to leave town for a while.”
“No,” said Ondine. “You’re leaving town for good. The occupation ends today. It’s been calamity for us, for the region. Go to your friend.”
“He’s not really my friend.”
“All the more reason to go to him,” said Ondine. “Jesus would be in Pennsylvania by now.”
* * *
Ypsilanti was easy to leave. I wasn’t from there. I’d just landed there. The Michigan Eviscerations had begun in Manhattan. Martha was a junior at NYU, heiress to a fuel-injection fortune. I was the cheeky barista who kept penciling my phone number on her latte’s heat sleeve. Cheeky and, I should add, quite hairy. Martha finally dialed the smudged figures on the corrugated cuff, cavorted in my belly fur. The woman never exhibited any qualms about our economic divide. After all, she’d remind me, I was a Jew. One day I’d just quit mucking around with burlap sacks of Guatemalan Sunrise and start brewing moolah.
“You can’t help it,” she said. “It’s a genetic thing. You weren’t allowed to own land in the Middle Ages.”
I wasn’t allowed to own land in Michigan either. We got married, but her folks bought the Ann Arbor house in her name. Martha enrolled for a master’s degree at the university. She demanded that I concoct a passion she could bankroll, a “doable dream.” What would it be? Poetry journal? Microlabel for the new jam rock? Nanobatch raki boutique? I mulled over these and other notions but mostly focused on my favored pursuit: grilling premium meats. I grilled grass-fed beef, saddles of rabbit, bison, organic elk. My mulled projects moldered. I’d always pictured myself the genius
in
the journal,
on
the label, not running the damn things. Moreover, wasn’t there bookkeeping involved, basic math? No matter what Martha believed about my inherited numerical wizardry honed on the twisty streets of Antwerp, or maybe Münster, I could barely count.
I grilled until the grilling season ended. Around the time the first shipment of Danish birch arrived for my new curing shed, Martha kicked me to what in this municipality wasn’t quite a curb. She’d met an equally hirsute Scot from the engineering school. His name happened to be Scott, and his people had the twisty brain too. Besides, our sex life was a wreck. We were down to those resentful tugs and frigs. She said the stench of burnt meat put her off. I figured it was also the weight I’d put on, the perpetual slick of cook grease on my chest beneath my loose kimono.
Ondine, an old beauty with hair the color of metallic marmalade, was historically attuned to her daughter’s fecklessness. She took pity, rented me a unit in a shingle-stripped Victorian she owned in Ypsilanti, let me slide on the rent until I found a job. I never did, but she seemed satisfied to visit a few times a week for my attentions. She called my style of lovemaking “poignant.”
Still, even before Davis called, I could tell she was getting bored.
“I’m getting bored,” she said.
It came to her suddenly, unbidden, the way it might strike you that you hadn’t gone candlepin bowling or eaten smoked oysters in years.
“You bore the piss out of me,” she said.
I stood, started to dress.
Ondine reached out, pinched my ass fuzz.
“Ouch.”
“Don’t be so sensitive. Lots of things bore me. Things I love. My husband. My house. My daughter. My Native American pottery collection. It’s not an insult.”
* * *
But if not an insult, it was a signal. Now, weeks later, I headed east in one of Ondine’s several Mazdas, a parting gift, along with a generous cash severance and a few keepsake snapshots of her in aspects of the huntress.
The dashboard robot in the Mazda goaded. Beneath its officious tones I sensed confusion, a geopositional wound. Had some caustic robot daddy made it feel directionless? Meanwhile, the comics on the satellite radio joked about their dainty white cocks. Such candor was supposed to prevent the race war.
My neck ached, and I bought an ice pack, wedged it up against my headrest. My tongue was a mess. I still tasted Ondine. Deep in Pennsylvania I ate a coq au vin quesadilla. It’s what Jesus would have ordered, and it was delicious.
I had to drive fast, before I ate too much road food.
The ragged rider, Davis had called himself, but I couldn’t parse the phrase. I was naturally undetective.
Clues clenched me up.
* * *
I’d booked a tiny room in the Hudson Lux in New York City, high up and hushed, a loneliness box of polished walnut and chrome. You could picture yourself dead of a hanging jackoff in such a room, your necktie living up to its name, your lubricated fingers curled stiff near your hips. I stretched out on the narrow bed, decided not to picture this. It wasn’t the kind of thing I figured I’d ever try. Aficionados cited the bliss spasm caused by air loss, but I wondered if most got orgasmic on the gamble. Anyway, everything in my life was a gamble, a wager that somebody would see to my needs. Was I secretly here because I thought Davis would somehow fit the bill even though he was sick? If so, who was sicker?
Now I shut my eyes, and Davis loped into view. He stood in an orchard of pomegranates, his legs greaved in low, personal mist. Tall, homely Davis, with his hamster fluff hair and granny specs.
We used to sip espressos in the campus café. Davis would read from his critical works: “In truth, of which there can be no certainty, the Peter Frampton phallus must be unfurled from the constrictive denim of manufactured desire’s sweatshop.”
I loved his papers, these phrases that seemed to trickle out of a plastic port under his shirt or hiss from slits in his hands. I wasn’t one of those narcissists who thought I had to understand something for it to be important. Besides, he wasn’t wrong about whatever the hell he meant.
He wasn’t wrong about much. I rarely went to lectures. Davis tutored me.
We drank beer in the old sailor’s bar and Davis would whisper about the Russians—Pushkin, in particular, whose story “The Shot” he so admired.
“Pushkin invented Russian literature as we know it,” he said.
“But I don’t know it,” I said.
Davis studied Latin, computers, knew some physics, dabbled in questions that plagued those he sneeringly called the string cheese theory people. He taught me to marvel at the elegance of Nagle’s law and the Peck conjecture, though maybe they had other names. Even words associated with counting undid me.
We slurped whiskey in our basement apartment with our friends and possible friends. Davis was the savior. I was his handsome disciple. Eventually Davis would get huffy about the cigarette smoke and stomp around the piles of books and laundry, the stray Stratocaster, the tripod with the liquid swivel. We were making an experimental video for our band, the Interpellations, but who wasn’t?
“How can you breathe in corporate death like that!” Davis shouted one night. “Smoke the kind, like me.”
“We’re not hippies,” said Caldwell, neobeat goblin. “I’ll take the bourbon of my fathers.”
“But this is the one thing the hippies got right!” Davis said, held aloft his cinnamon-scented bong. “Maybe they sold out the working class, but they grooved! Anyway, there are too many of them. So few of us. They will rule our lives forever. They will never pass the torch.”
“Do we deserve it?” I said. I guess I’d gotten tired of being his disciple.
“I do,” said Davis.
“So what kind of ruling-class motherfucker are you,” I said, “to be talking about the torch?”
I knew this would bother him. He’d been born into citrus money. We’d get crates of tangelos delivered to our door. Also, his girlfriend, the Brilliant Brianna, which was her official nickname, had made some late-night sojourns to my ashy mattress. Davis starred in the Invention of Monogamy seminar, so his hands were tied, so to speak, but I could tell he seethed.
“Be nice,” Brianna mouthed now, but I plowed on, foolishly, for her, I imagine. I was not yet heart literate.
“Davis,” I said. “Davis.”
“What is it, Sasha, my brother?”
“My name isn’t Sasha.”
“Is it something?”
“Davis,” I said. “You’ve grown clownish. I’m sure you’re right about the cigarettes. But you’re not our father.”
“I don’t believe in fathers,” said the goblin Caldwell. “Except my bourbon fathers. Listen to Sasha.”
“Davis sucks,” called a girl near the stereo. “Sasha, or whatever, is our hero. Ask Brianna.”
Brianna ducked her head, but Davis caught her eye. He threw her an evil glance as he departed. We stayed, drank, smoked, forgot bad things. We laughed. We stood up and sat down. We impersonated each other standing up and sitting down. We told tedious stories about our childhoods, feigned enthrallment. That part of the evening arrived when people sat closer together on the carpet. One groupuscule, a reedy boy and two brawny women, groped and giggled, mashed their faces for a trilateral smooch. Brianna and I fell entwined into the couch.
“What makes you think you’re smart enough to talk to him like that?” she whispered, tongued my ear. “You’re just a dumb piece of gash. We like you for your innocent enthusiasm. Remember that.”
“I will.”
“No, you won’t.”
That’s when Davis returned with his velvet-lined mahogany pistol case. A brace of Berettas gleamed from their notches: compacts, pearl handled, gold flecked. We broke our clinches as Davis called the room to attention.
“Big happenings, entertainment-wise, folks. Gather round for what will prove a violent and transformative highlight of your lives.”