Fragile bottles

Rock lent an old acquaintance a bottle of insulin. Hours later, as they stood in a rain-soaked alley between two buildings in downtown Little Rock, he asked him to return it.

The acquaintance complied by removing the tiny bottle from the right front pocket of his shorts and skipping it like a stone across the wet gravel. Rock caught it, and was surprised to see it was undamaged. "Shit, man, these things are really easy to break," he said. "Not to mention that they cost about eighty dollars."

A quarterback reborn

The Harris-Stowe Hornets improved to 9-1 with a lopsided victory at Arkansas-Pine Bluff, but the game was marred by knee injuries to their only two quarterbacks.
One game remained, against the Alabama Crimson Tide, ranked number one throughout college football, and Harris-Stowe did not have an available quarterback on its roster.
Someone at Harris-Stowe, a historically black college in St. Louis, told an assistant coach that Rock played quarterback as a child. Consequently, the day after the game in Arkansas, the assistant asked Rock to join him for a tryout on a field near the Mississippi River.
Rock was fifty-five years old. He hadn't thrown a football in years and was thus skeptical about his chance to make the team. But his first pass hit the coach chest high as he sprinted across the field thirty yards away, and Rock's confidence soared. Each pass he threw found its target with a surprising and impressive zip.
Just like that, Rock was named the Hornets' new quarterback.
He was celebrated across the campus, and delighted by the opportunity. It was the sort of thing he had daydreamed about most of his life.
At some point though, Rock remembered he was a fragile, aging man, about to face three-hundred-pound twenty-year-olds whose top speed were much, much faster than his. Obviously a single hit might put him out of the game. He couldn't possibly expect to play for long, and might very well be severely injured.

Faldo's mistake

Greg Norman sat with Rock near the 17th green at Augusta National. They were part of a small gallery following Nick Faldo and Ricky Fowler at an exhibition of some sort.
They watched Faldo chip from five feet in front of the green, fifty feet from the pin, which was set eight feet from the back left edge. The ball rolled slowly past Norman and Rock, decelerating as it climbed toward the hole. With Faldo in casual pursuit, his chip missed by inches left and began to pick up speed as it rolled inevitably toward the fringe and the subsequent steep slope that would take it perhaps twenty yards off the green. But Faldo reached down and stopped the ball in its tracks a foot from the fringe. Incredibly, he simply stopped it with the palm of his left hand. A collective gasp rose up from the gallery. Rock was stunned.
"Did you see that?" Rock said.
"I did," Norman said. "And you know what, I can't believe it."
Fowler approached his ball, in the fringe in two, and three feet from where Rock sat. As Fowler walked by, Rock whispered to him. "Did you see what just happened?"
"I didn't see anything. What was it?"
Rock paused. In no more than a spit second it occurred to him that he was about to become part of the story, which as a sportswriter was far down the list of things he wanted. "You know what, never mind. It was probably nothing."
"OK, fine," Fowler said. His attention turned in an instant to the shot before him.
Norman tapped Pete on the shoulder and told him Fowler was not the one to talk to. "If you have any information to share, tell his caddie."
"What would you do?"
"Me, I'd leave it alone."

Rainwater

Rock rode his new Vespa south into Pocahontas, Arkansas, from his grandmother's southeastern Missouri farm. Though he had passed this way dozens of times, it seemed unfamiliar to him. He knew he missed a turn when he suddenly found himself on a narrow neighborhood street.
The Vespa would not cooperate. Rock couldn't get it to roll backward or turn significantly enough to reverse its direction. He abandoned it and walked back to where he thought he'd turned off the highway.
He reached a convenience-store parking lot. Of all things, there sat Randy Rainwater behind the wheel of a sports utility vehicle. Rainwater had been Rock's cohost on Drivetime Sports twenty-five years earlier.
"Rock, what are you doing in Pocahontas?"
"I'm just trying to get home, Randy. What are you doing here?"
"The same thing. Jump in."
As they drove to find Rock's motorbike, he suggested a question for the Drivetime sports quiz: Name the native Arkansans in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Rock dreams

It was at least an hour before daybreak. Rock had just returned from the bathroom to his front bedroom bed where he would continue his attempt to arrange a permanent connection between his present state and his afterlife.
A few minutes earlier, before he awoke to use the bathroom, Rock had investigated routes used by others. He saw for instance how God had simply spoken the words "number one," and then watched them ascend into eternity along a perfectly vertical path.
Before Rock made such an attempt, or even determined what message to send, he felt it was essential that he find his glasses, dress in fresh socks and shorts, and find the most comfortable spot on the bed.

Willie and Crutch

Rock and his first cousin Crutch Aikman chipped and putted on the No. 9 green at Fort Roots Golf Course, practicing for a round they were about to play with Rock's friend from the paper Randall Hunhauf.
Crutch had a story that he couldn't remember whether he'd told Rock. Months earlier, back in April, he had played as a marker at the LPGA Championship in Clarksville, Arkansas.
Rock was surprised to learn about it, and impressed. "Wow, who'd they put you with?"
"Willie Oates," Crutch said.
Willie Oates had been known for at least two generations in Arkansas as the Hat Lady. She was a long-time Little Rock socialite, famous for her outlandish hats, who once served in the Arkansas state legislature.
"Really? I didn't know Willie was still alive."
"Yeah, she's still alive and still a pretty good golfer."
"Well, tell me how you played," Rock said.
"You know, I only played nine holes. I had a fifty."
"No kidding. That's pretty good, Crutch. I mean, heck, those tees for that tournament were at what, at least sixty-five hundred yards, right?"
"Somewhere around that," Crutch said. "And the course was setup pretty hard."
"Oh, man, I know. I saw it on TV."
Rock noticed Hunhauf approach from the parking lot, his clubs behind him on a pull-cart. Rock introduced him to Crutch. "And listen to this; Crutch was a marker for Willie Oates at the LPGA in Clarksville. He scored a fifty for nine holes."
Hunhauf was clearly impressed.

The Dead Peckers

Rock pulled into the Rebsamen Park Golf Course parking lot and saw that Tim Coop had arrived just ahead of him. He parked beside Coop's car and got out to pull his clubs from the trunk.
"Here comes Dave," Coop said.
Rock turned to see Dave Hollisman park his old Volkswagen Bug behind him and walk over with his clubs.
"How's that car running?" Rock said.
Dave's Bug had grown to his friends into a significant part of his persona. It, like he, was an admirable mess. The car's original sky-blue paint job had oxidized to dust, and rust extended up from its threshold in veins that, after forty years of progress, reached at least halfway up the side panels. Anyone inside, once they'd dug through an assortment of garbage typically dominated by beer cans and fast-food bags, could see whatever was under the car through rusty holes in the floor board.
"It's not running very well," Dave said. "The engine is just about shot."
"So are you going to get a new car."
"No way. I'm gonna put a new engine in this one."
As they spoke, Rock noticed a group of elderly men walk out of the clubhouse toward the course. He immediately identified them as the Dead Peckers, a group he had written about twenty-five years earlier for the now-defunct Arkansas Gazette. They told him at the time that they'd chosen their name after several of them overheard a girl say to another, "Come on, hurry up. We don't want to get stuck behind these dead peckers."
It was apparent to Rock that his two friends and he now faced a similar need for haste.

Town outing

They didn't know this was coming. Rock rode in Elaine's station wagon with Ron and Elaine up front and he in the back with Susy and Jamey. They noticed as they drove through Park Hill on JFK Boulevard toward I-40 that a festival was underway. Thousands of people were gathered around the few storefronts there. A large sign was strung across the street that read, 'TOWN OUTING."
"What the fuck is this?" Rock said.
"I don't know," Ron said. "I didn't know anything about it."
They continued along JFK, down the hill across I-40, and as they slowed for a red light noticed runners streaming past—a few at first, and then hundreds. There was a road race in progress with no traffic control.
Susy pulled out her cell phone and aimed it toward a woman running past the car. "Smile, bitch," she said.
Rock later looked at the photo of the woman scowling.
"Why did you call her a bitch?" he said.
Susy could not explain.

Gu

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, had handed out this special republican campaign shampoo for weeks. Rock washed his hair with it near the start of a long run, where many people would soon gather, and suddenly felt compelled to rinse away the telltale red foam. He didn't want people to think he endorsed any particular cause or party. All Rock cared about was the free shampoo.
Seconds after that note of frugalness, Rock realized he had forgotten to bring any energy gel. He stood near fellow runners Rob Wistrand, Ken Starnz, several women, including Elaine Gimblet and Kacey Smith, and Kurt "The Run and Puke Kid" Wagner, a good friend since high school.
"Aw, shit,  I forgot to bring any Gu," Rock said. "I got nine million tubes of it at home, and I got none here in my pants. And I'm out of luck. You know, you just can't go buy Gu on a moments notice."
"No, you can't," someone said. "You just can't."
"It's almost impossible to find, and then when you do, it seems as if it's always tied in with some other special," Rock said. "You know, like, 'Buy ten tubes of Gu and we'll give you two pairs of running panties.' Plus, it never fails, I go into a running store for a few tubes of Gu, and I end up spending a hundred and seventy-eight dollars on all sorts of other crap."

Blubber

Andrea Kendrick, perhaps the best high school softball player Arkansas had ever produced, decided to play college for the University of Alabama. As Rock researched a story for the newspaper, he found that she made her choice based on the availability for Alabama's softball program of a certain kind of whale blubber which made it easier for pitchers to get action on their pitches.
Kendrick explained to Rock that it was perfectly legal for softball pitchers to apply blubber to softballs, but that most programs couldn't afford it.

Hash homocide

Rock and his fellow Hash House Harrier buddies drank from cans of Milwaukee's Best Light on his gravel driveway.
John Kohn sat down in the back seat of Rock's twenty-year-old Chevy Cavalier and began to dig through empty beer and soda pop cans and newspapers and fast-food containers on the floorboard for a place to put his feet. He picked up a tattered McDonald's bag. "Holy shit," he said as he turned his head from the bag. "How long has this been back here? It fucking reeks, man."
Everyone laughed.
Rock watched John Good, clearly the drunkest of his guests, climb from the front seat and run into his backyard, where Greg Pipe stood with his back toward them as he peed in the grass. Rock suddenly realized Good had a pistol in hand, the same gun Rock thought he had returned to his father years before. Apparently it had been in his car. Rock knew it had a hairpin trigger, and started to warn Good, but it was too late. Good had already tossed the gun in the air. It was nearly certain to fire when it landed, which it did no more than a foot behind Pipe, whose back immediately arched away from the gunshot. He collapsed to the ground.
Rock thought to call for an ambulance, but hesitated. Pipe was shot. He looked dead, and Rock knew big trouble had arrived.

Luigi's

This circumstance for Rock was nearly as good as he any he had experienced, and certainly far beyond what he commonly expected. He had just eaten at a pricey, renowned Italian restaurant in Indianapolis with several Little Rock Hash House Harriers and two former girlfriends, Kelly and Jenny.
They were headed to an Indianapolis Colts game and everyone was in high spirits. Rock was the first to walk out. As he did, he held the door open for a man and his party of three or four others so they could enter.
"Welcome to Luigi's," said Rock in the tone of an eager maitre d'. "I would advise you to skip the special. It sucks."
The man laughed. "So, don't get the tortellini."
"No, they're wasting their time on it. It's keeping them away from the pizzas."
The group stopped and looked at Rock, clearly amused. "I don't believe pizza is on their menu," the man said, smiling.
Rock tilted his head back. "Sir, numerous college students work here. I can assure you there is a heavy wooden roller and a bag of pot in the kitchen. Trust me, they can make you a pizza."

Pine Bluff

It had been years since Rock took Central Avenue through Pine Bluff to get to a UAPB Golden Lions football game, even though it was the most direct route. Nevertheless, it seemed irrational that he chose to take it this day. For one thing, he was driving drunk for the first time in several weeks. Furthermore, typical of a game day, the street was swamped with traffic.
Right after Rock turned onto the busy street, he realized he'd nearly cut off a police car driving quickly in the opposite direction, and that furthermore his seat belt was unbuckled. He immediately buckled his belt and continued his drive through the crowded business district.
It did not look familiar to him, and not at all like anything he had seen in Pine Bluff. There were people everywhere, lined up at restaurants and bars in what had obviously become either a tourist district or a draw for the pregame college crowd.
Rock came to an intersection that confused him. He wasn't sure whether he should veer left or continue straight. He went straight, and knew almost at once that he had turned onto a sharply uphill street leading to a cul de sac packed with more restaurants. His car had suddenly become a small, cellophane package of Kleenex, and he was forced to use his legs to help propel it up the hill.

The reception

There were at least five hundred people at this wedding reception, Rock figured. It was at a college in a desert setting, perhaps in New Mexico. He was there with his father, whom he had not seen in at least an hour.
Rock knew no one else at the party, though he struck up a conversation with a bearded, balding man who he estimated was in his mid-thirties. It began shortly after Rock found a room tucked away in an administration building, central to the party, which had in it little more than a couch and two chairs aimed at an old, nineteen-inch analog television on a small bracket attached to a wall. He directed his new acquaintance to the room.
"I guess this is a hideaway for the chancellor," Rock said. "I wonder why they don't have a big, flat-screen television back here?"

Fire

There was a gathering of twenty or so Little Rock Hashers and friends in a parking lot on the edge of downtown Little Rock. John Krone was looking up, and said, "Hey, Rock, that smoke looks like it's coming from Orange Street."
Rock noticed the horizontal column of black smoke rolling from the north, several hundred feet up. Within seconds bits of charred paper began to fall onto the lot. Rock examined a few, and though he did not truly suspect his house was on fire or had burned, was somewhat relieved to find nothing familiar in the paper, nothing at all that looked as if anything from his house was its source.
Suddenly it became obvious to Rock and everyone else that the fire was nearby. In fact, an old brick apartment building no more than a couple of blocks south of the lot was clearly burning. The half of it that faced them had collapsed, and reminded Rock of the photographs he'd seen of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, destroyed by Timothy McVeigh in conjunction with other terrorists in the spring of 1995.

Snuff

It was an old, eight-hundred square-foot house near a landfill on the edge of town. Two college boys lived there, friends of a friend of Rock's, Bob Holtz, who covered the Razorbacks for the paper. Rock and Bob had spent the night, Rock on a couch in the filthy den.
Rock awoke shortly after Bob, just past dawn on a game-day Saturday in fall. He noticed at first that he had three fresh cans of Copenhagen snuff he attempted to hide the night before around the cushions of the couch where there were a wad of towels he'd formed into a pillow. Later he would wonder why the snuff was there at all. He had broken that thirty-five year habit several years before. Nevertheless, hiding the cans from Bob and their hosts remained important, so he stuffed them into the front pockets in the jeans he'd slept in.
The room smelled of old food, beer, and the blotted layer of newspapers and dirty clothes spread throughout. Neither of Bob's friends were up, and Bob suggested he and Rock leave immediately. Rock agreed, and rode away in Bob's car past the landfill, into which he tossed an old insulin syringe he found in his pants.

Hunk

NBC News broadcast a special report late in their evening report. Brian Williams said Rock had apparently come in contact with an agent of some sort in, perhaps, a chemical laboratory at the University of Arkansas nearly thirty years earlier which had caused him to bulk up like a body builder.
"I guess I can think of worse things that could've happened," Rock said.

Flight plans

The National Transportation Safety Board asked Rock to examine the path of a commercial jet which crashed into his front bedroom. He had witnessed many examples of the intended flight plan over the years and more importantly watched all of the frightening and complex route taken by the plane now in shards in his house on Orange Street.
Rock had watched from his bed as the plane flew out of Dallas-Fort Worth en route to Lambert Field in St. Louis. At some point over Texas, it turned east and flew over the Atlantic to Europe. Rock could not explain why the pilot would have voluntarily chosen to fly so far off course. As far as he could tell passengers were transferred to another jet that was bound for St. Louis while in flight in Europe.
The plane was destroyed in the crash a few minutes later, but no passengers were injured and Rock's house escaped damage. The NTSB would undoubtedly want those bizarre anomalies investigated.
Rock knew this would take a while.

Golf clubs

The Green Bay Packers were playing, and Rock's friend Josh Bernhurst had called to say he would host a small watch party. Rock usually watched televised Packers games at home, alone, but made an exception and rode his bicycle to Josh's apartment.
Josh lived in a first-floor efficiency off of a drab alley in an impoverished, decadent part of the city. Rock had been there before, thus knew to expect the overwhelming clutter he walked around and over as he entered the apartment. The rooms were sanitary, but there were boxes of all sizes everywhere, empty and full, mostly made of white cardboard. Josh led a research team at the local medical school, and desks and counters and tabletops throughout his den overflowed with a seemingly infinite variety of laboratory equipment—miniature centrifuges, test tube racks, washers, shakers, transfer vessels, hot plates, and many things Rock could not possibly identify.
"Find a seat if you can," Josh said.
Rock negotiated his way to a chair near the television. The game had already started, so Rock did not hesitate to sit next to a mutual acquaintance of his and Josh's, a short, slim man name Craig, with his omnipresent, flawlessly-trimmed goatee.
Josh stood behind a waist-high cabinet, all that separated his small kitchen from the den. He turned to open the refrigerator, but stopped and turned back toward Rock. "Hey, man, I have something for you," he said.
"Really?" Rock said. "What is it?"
"Man, I'm not sure, but it looks like it might be golf equipment. It came in the mail. It's in some boxes in my bedroom."
"You're kidding. Did Linda send it?"
Linda was an ex-girlfriend of Rock's. He had left his golf clubs at her and her husband's house in Texas the last time he visited them, a year or so earlier.
"I don't know," Josh said. "I have no idea who sent it."
The first box Rock opened contained several golf shafts, the others no doubt heavy club heads. Rock couldn't believe his clubs had been disassembled and was immediately angered. Even the grips had been removed from the shafts. "I can't fucking believe it," he said. "Why would anyone do this?"

Phoenix

Rock sat with several thousand Phoenix Suns fans at the Suns' home court, US Airways Center in Phoenix, gathered for a tribute to retired guard Chris Mullin, though Mullin never played for the Suns.
Mullin spoke briefly about how much work he had put in since he retired, how he worked everyday mentoring Suns forward Robert Paragould.
Rock sat in the middle of the aging crowd, distinguished by a microphone placed in front of him. It seemed to everyone, including Mullin, that Rock was there to conduct some sort of interview. Rock had no idea this would be expected of him, but nevertheless complied.
"So, Chris, you're saying that helping Paragould for a couple hours a day is a lot of work," Rock said. The crowd laughed, as did Mullin. "You come over here when you have a little free time and help Paragould. That's a lot of work, huh?"
Laughter rolled through the building, and it occurred to Rock that he could not miss with this crowd. He wondered right then if there were anyway to turn this success into a job, perhaps on radio or television.

Somewhere in Kentucky

Several amateur golfers from Arkansas were qualified to play in a national tournament of some significance in Lynn, Kentucky, and Arkansas Demozet sports editor Jay Krip offered Rock the assignment.
Rock accepted, though he knew the time commitment required would conflict with his job at the Super Family Dollar Store in Levy. Also, he hadn't heard of Lynn. Because of Kentucky's proximity to Arkansas, Lynn's location was much more than incidental. It could take anywhere from five to twelve hours to drive to a particular town in Kentucky. Rock and Jay studied a map of the state for several minutes before they found Lynn not far from Bowling Green, eight or nine hours from Little Rock.
Rock's boss at the dollar store agreed to let Rock take a few days off.

Hollywood

Everything Rock owned was on the line—his house, his cash, his investments, all of it rode on the outcome of the Disney cartoon he and his Hollywood producer were stitching together in Rock's house on Orange Street in Levy.
They and their crew had struggled throughout the morning with a shortage of Super 8 film, the only that would duplicate the speed needed to represent each of the stars and stripes on the American flags their characters—including Mickey and Minne Mouse—would ride through the den, out onto the front porch, and into the lawn and street. Someone down the chain of command had delivered spool after spool of Regular 8, not nearly adequate without major adjustments.
Rock sat on his couch with his cat Jo, desperately attempting to splice the inferior film with the Super 8, though there were no doubts in the house that his effort would prove inadequate.
A car, a Subaru station wagon, stopped in the street at the end of Rock's driveway. Rock saw Merle, a neighbor, step from the driver's seat, and felt instant relief from his nightmare. Merle's arms and hands were full of plastic shopping bags. They in turn, Rock knew, were full of golf books with which all would be saved.

Poverty

Rock was working as a sportswriter in a city overrun by poverty. He didn't yet know why, but an assignment sent him to an outdoor kitchen, and he stood there at dusk on a wide and deep balcony overlooking hundreds of bedraggled, unkempt men dressed in grubby and tattered clothes.
As these men wandered and mulled about below them, Rock and his coworker Steve Rodgers took sips of bourbon from the glass liter bottle Rock carried.
They looked at the vast, looming city skyline, which served for them as the kitchen's backdrop, and Rock was surprised to see so few lights—of the twenty or so buildings he could see, lights were on in three or four windows on the lower floors of one building. Though it was a weekday, there was no traffic, nothing close to bustle. It was quiet. "It looks like Pyongyang," Rock said.
A weary, scraggly man headed for them across the balcony. He held an old metal cup to Rock.
"Here, let me pour you some of this," Rock said.

A dog at the fair

There was seemingly much at stake, though it was unclear to Rock what sort of challenge he faced.
Somehow Rock's connection with a young woman's dog that she asked him to take to a county fair would decide the fate of his and the her relationship. It had no history that Rock knew of, but she was a small brunette whom he found breathtaking in a girl-next-door sort of way. She wore no makeup other than reddish and tan from the sun. She spent most of her days outside, running, biking, gardening, or golfing.
In Rock's experience at the fair, she looked on in disappointment, and only from a distance. The dog seemed indifferent to him, as if it were a feral cat Rock had never before seen.
Toward the end of their evening, Rock felt as though the stakes had been raised, that he was threatened by more than the end of relations with this pretty woman, theretofore a stranger to him.
The dog ran from away from Rock, off the fairgrounds and toward the woman's house. Rock followed as carefully as he could so as to not scare it beyond range. He succeeded and walked into the woman's house a moment after the dog. The woman was a few steps behind, accompanied by two men Rock recognized as her father and brother. They both looked angry to Rock, who suddenly felt in immediate danger.
He was unsure what to do, but persisted in his failed attempt to win this dog's and this woman's hearts.

Roll cake

Rock was at a major college football game somewhere in the Deep South. He was under the stadium near a concession stand when an elderly, obese man handed him a plate of rolls coated with white icing.
"Here," said the man, dressed in dark red pants, a matching sweatshirt, and well-worn, black Rockport dress shoes. He seemed to know Rock. "This here plate of cake is for you."
Rock eagerly dug in. The cake-rolls were hot, as though they had just come from a grandmother's oven, and melted butter ran down Rock's right arm from the first one he picked up. The outermost layer of the thick, warm icing was nearly crisp, so that Rock felt a smooth snap as he bit through it. After he had eaten two, his hands were sticky, and he felt the icing on his face. Festive football fans looked on and smiled in amusement, fueled by Rock's appearance and the joy of game day.
Another large man, built as if he were forty or fifty years removed from a high school offensive of defensive line, walked by laughing. "Where'd you git them sweet rolls, son?"
Rock simultaneously recognized his place in the immediate festivity and a concern for his blood sugar level. He was overjoyed but wished it did not make an insulin injection so inconvenient. Already he felt hypoglycemic and thirsty. He needed to go to the bathroom.

Indianapolis

Nineteen years had passed since Rock's last stay at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. He was there for the first time with a roommate; he and Chris Gibbons had arrived the previous day to cover a basketball tournament for the paper.
They were out on an upper floor deck near a swimming pool beneath overcast skies. It was near dawn, but still dark, and Rock saw through a small opening in the clouds what he thought was a meteor shower. He was about to comment on it when Gibbons wondered aloud where the young woman was who the night before said would meet them for breakfast.
It began to rain, and Rock knew in an instant that what he seconds earlier believed were meteors had been no more than a lighter version of the rainfall now upon them. It was getting heavier by the second. As Rock and Chris hurried for the door to the hallway, they saw the woman they'd expected approach from inside.
Before they even said hello, Rock said, "Shit, you now what Gibbons, when I saw the rain, when it was still falling lightly, I thought it was a meteor shower. Then it started getting harder, and my first thought was like, 'Oh god, we're going to get crushed to death!"
Gibbons reacted as if this were the funniest thing he'd heard, falling to his knees in convulsive laughter.

Baseball

Victory was essential. Rock was certain of that, but of little else.
He had fallen asleep the night before as he attempted to break down the strategy employed by his baseball team's opponent. The complexity was just short of overwhelming, and Rock was uncertain of his ability to unwind it.
He watched several teams on wireless video, including the Pittsburgh Pirates, the only he could remember after he woke up. They each advanced runners to first base, and then asked them to reach second. That was simple enough, but these bits of information began to overlap and Rock failed with each attempt to pull them into any sensible form. All he knew is that he could not fail, that lives were at stake.
It took several minutes for Rock to realize this was an insane circumstance for baseball, and was indeed unreal.
All the while his cats Jo and Pam looked on, seemingly puzzled.

Radio

Rock was a morning guest on a Little Rock radio talk show, seated with two women co-hosts and lead host Jason Acrey.
Their conversation had weaved though sports and politics and arrived at information technology, at which point Rock proceeded with the type of self-evident commentary commonly used by radio announcers who know very little of which they speak. "A lot of us, perhaps most of us, are connected to the Internet during each of our waking hours," he said. "We're almost always within a few feet of our phones, or our tablets, or our computers."
The women were visibly engaged with Rock, nodding and smiling in agreement with his obvious remarks.
Meanwhile it appeared Acrey was distracted by a crowd of young adults Rock could see in the hallway. It was almost the top of the hour and it became clear that the people were there to promote a cause or some commercial interest. Rock realized it was time for him to leave.

Coach Rock

Though he wasn't qualified to coach anything but running, Rock was the head boys basketball coach at North Little Rock High.
Rock's team had performed well in his first season, making a deep run into the state playoffs. Nevertheless, he was suspended shortly after the season for having played an ineligible player. Someone had discovered a transfer irregularity from the year before he arrived, and North Little Rock High principal Jerry Smith allowed Rock to take the fall. Students throughout the school were upset by what they perceived as unfairness dealt their beloved coach. They staged a parade of protest from the parking lot of the Waffle House on Main Street.
The protesters marched south, half a block on Main before they turned right on 22nd to pass in front of the eighty-year-old school building, a gothic revival colossus similar to nearby Little Rock Central's building (though with nothing close to the historical significance). Rock sat on the broad staircase with several players in a crowd of at least a thousand students and faculty as the protesters paraded past.
Rock noticed that Smith watched him from the weed-strewn lawn of a dilapidated house across the street. Smith lifted a megaphone to his mouth and said, "Coach Rock, I suggest you avoid getting your picture in the paper."
It was overcast. Rain had been predicted, so several in the gathering brought umbrellas. A student in front of Rock opened one right after Smith's pronouncement. "Here Coach," he said. "You can hide behind this if you think you need to."

Beautiful people

This reminded Rock of the few fraternity parties he attended while in graduate school. He felt completely out of place.
Bill Victory, a republican campaign consultant, had invited him, and now seemed embarrassed by Rock, who watched Victory walk around the office lounge glad handing everyone, working the room crowded with people who looked as if they had stepped out of a Dillard's catalogue. Victory seemed to know everyone well, all of these people different in every regard from Rock.
Rock, too, was embarrassed, unable or unwilling—he hoped the latter—to converse with any of these conventionally beautiful people.

Black oak

Black oaks had been at the center of environmental concerns and protests for weeks, and on this sunny and warm afternoon Rock and Walt stood among hundreds of them near the entrance to a popular California state park.
Rock and Walt and dozens of other visitors were in an outdoor lobby, milling through exhibits when Rock noticed the trees. "Hey, look, black oaks," he said. "Have you read that stuff in the paper?"
"You mean where when they burn one of them it leads to at least fifty deaths?" Walt said.
"Exactly. Sounds crazy doesn't it?"
A cute young woman stood near them and caught Rock's eye "Do you mind if I ask what this is you're saying about black oaks?" she said.
Rock of course didn't, and mentioned a recently published report. "It said the long-term effects of burning them will lead to at least fifty people dying per tree burned."
"People are dying?" she said. "What do you mean by long-term effects?
"Well, I don't think they've been able to connect the burning of them to any specific death," Rock said. "Somehow they seem to have convinced themselves that people are dying long after the trees have burned. Obviously if they could get fifty names in the paper they'd shut down burning them immediately."

Newall

The basketball game would start in a few minutes. Rock was there, excited to see if the UALR Trojans could hang in against the Iowa Hawkeyes. They were about to play in a large auditorium, with seating limited to one side.
Rock walked through the mezzanine toward his seat when he saw UALR's head coach Mike Newall. He reached to shake Newall's hand. Newall scowled.
"Good luck, Mike," Rock said.
"Thanks," said Newall, clearly disinterested in meeting Rock for the first time in six years.
Assistant Coach Steve Sheelds said, "Hey, Rock, good to see you."
"Same here, Steve," Rock said. "Good luck."
Rock hurried to his seat, which was between Marge Newall and hers and Mike's thirty-year-old son Nate, who looked exactly like Tall Bob's son Kevin.
"Wow, Nate, I haven't seen you since you were a little boy," Rock said.
"No, we saw each other just last year at the Maumelle Country Club," Nate said. "Don't you remember? I work there."
Rock remembered. "Of course," he said. "We were out there for the USGA Amateur Championship."
Iowa won the game, 95-43.

Running

Rock was with a group of Little Rock and Hot Springs Hashers on a training run along the North Little Rock side of the Arkansas River and felt fitter and faster than he had in years. He ran just behind the fastest of Hashers.
At the turnaround of the eight-mile out-and-back course, which was Kathy's apartment, Rock asked where the bathroom was. Kathy responded with an almost contemptuous look, as though the answer were obvious and the question silly and unnecessary. He looked past her through the kitchen and saw the bathroom through a wide door, and also heard from it the sound of water running.
Once inside, Rock was confused by the commode. It was perfectly round with a diameter of about four feet, and made of concrete painted black. The bottom of the bowl was flat and only an inch below the rim. Water continuously washed across the surface, but Rock's urine stream, as he expected, splashed against a wall and onto the floor.

Chocolate

In retrospect, Rock thought he made a mistake.
While filling in as a copy editor at the newspaper in Atkins, Arkansas, Rock told the managing editor that a report had just come out that said chocolate ice cream had twenty-five percent more protein than vanilla. Though the story was merely a product of Rock's imagination, the managing editor immediately made space for it on the front page. Perfect, Rock thought. That was his hope from the start.
Rock at first believed he had really put one over, but it later occurred to him that his hoax would most likely be exposed, possibly leading to broad ridicule from fellow journalists.

Yard work

Someone delivered Rock several wrapped Christmas gifts, all of which he suspected were bottles of wine or liquor. He opened one and found it contained a bottle of eighty-four proof watermelon wine. As he examined the bottle, wondering how wine could contain so much alcohol and why anyone would make wine out of watermelon, he saw through his living room windows a pickup truck with a trailer lose control and slide through his wet front lawn, digging muddy groves as it skidded to a stop.
Rock recognized the driver, a crackhead who lived up the street.
"Fuck, man, look what you've done to my yard," Rock said.
The crackhead seemed completely indifferent. "Big deal," he said. "You stole my electric skillet."
"Do what?"
"Well, OK, you didn't actually steal it yourself. Jeff stole it, and then you bought it from him."
To prevent further damage, Rock directed the crackhead to back his truck out through the groves just dug.

35th Steet

Though it was early September in Levy, the sky was cold and gray and a light sprinkle of grainy snow blew across the gravel alley behind Rock's house.
Two old running friends, a husband and wife in their mid-sixties, were staying with Rock in his tiny house on 35th Street. Rock stretched with them outside, about to go for a run when the husband asked him what type of running shoes he was wearing. "Oh, you know man, these are called, I can't remember, something like 928s or some number," Rock said. "Maybe 930s."
"I've never heard of them. They're Asics, right?"
"Wait, yes. That's it. They're DS Trainers."
Rock's friend laughed and said, "They've made those for years. Where did you come up with those numbers?"

Plane crashes

Rock watched as planes crashed all around him. He was driving to play in a softball game for the newspaper's team in Shreveport when the first Boeing 747 spun out of control miles ahead. It exploded immediately after it nosedived into an open field. Several other 747s crashed within minutes. Rock also saw a glider broken in two in a parking lot.
It took two or three plane crashes before Rock considered whether the softball game would be cancelled.

A new pet fish

Throughout his life Rock had kept pet fish. He was at his grandmother's house in Nashville with a large gathering of people one afternoon when Chris and Erin appeared by surprise. Chris had a small fish, about the size, color, and shape of a minnow, in a translucent plastic cup. It was a gift for Rock.
Rock was pleased and spent a minute looking for a spare canning jar in the pantry by the kitchen. He covered the jar's bottom with marbles, then walked out through the screened back porch to a faucet on the west side of the house. He filled the jar and walked back through the porch and kitchen to his grandmother's large bedroom, which also served as the den.
While in the kitchen, Rock took a bite from a large smoked fish someone had bought.
Later, in the den, as Chris put the pet fish in the jar, Rock knew he would have to spit out the smoked fish. It tasted awful. He turned his head from the gathering and spit the black mush into his right palm and immediately heard sounds of disgust from his cousin Crutch's Aunt Nadene. Consequently, he walked out through the front door and tossed the chewed wad of fish from the porch into the yard.

The parakeet

Erin and Rock were seated on the floor of one of Rock's bedrooms when a parakeet flew in. The bird was spectacularly colored, in bright shades of red, blue, yellow, and orange arranged randomly in small patches from head to tail. It landed on the hardwood floor near Rock and walked in circles, its colors distinct against the room's white walls and furniture, and the bedding Rock sat back against.
"Wow, look at this bird," Rock said.
"It's incredible," Erin said.
 Two brown puppies ran in almost immediately thereafter.

Weather events

It was summertime, but no one seemed surprised by the patchy snow all over Rebsamen Park Golf Course.
Rock stood in several inches that had been swept from the number-six tee box, and noticed that one of the golfers in an approaching group was a young sportswriter from the Arkanasas Democrat-Gazette. He couldn't remember the man's name, but they spoke affably.
Later they were in the clubhouse, seated at a table in the grill, when a tremendous storm blew in. High winds blew rain horizontally past the large picture window. Rock looked straight up through a large skylight in the ceiling and saw distinct patterns in the dark gray overcast, each sharply outlined in random shapes, like counties on a state map. Then he saw patterns of small numbers, which looked as if they had faded into the storm from a bar code.
"What is that?" the sportswriter said.
"I don't know," Rock said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Golf

Rock and his brother John were swinging golf clubs at dusk in the five-acre, rolling lawn of a red brick apartment building in St. Louis. John lived there with his wife and five children.
For several minutes they took practice swings, until John teed up a ball and swung away with a fairway wood. He made poor contact. The ball traveled low, fading across the lawn toward a house about a hundred yards away. It stopped in hedges that ran around the base of the house.
"I've done that before," Rock said. "I'm sure you were sweating out whether it was going to break a window."
John laughed and said that was exactly his fear.

The football

Rock was at a campsite with several friends from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers, and they were tossing around his football. It rained heavily the night before, so there were puddles of water everywhere.
Rock threw a pass that sailed over Zach's head and bounced across a gravel road and parking area to the edge of a large puddle. Zach picked up a blue pillow from the road and threw it to Rock.
"Zach, I'm not going to play catch with a fucking pillow when I brought an eighty-dollar football," Rock said.
Zach laughed.
As Rock walked toward what he thought was the ball, it gradually became clear to him that it was nothing but a football-sized boulder. He looked around for a few minutes before concluding that the ball was lost. He considered that it might have been stolen.

Tulane basketball

A tiny, cute blonde student from the Tulane sports information office approached Rock and handed him a small slip of paper as he ate his complimentary pregame meal.
"Have you gotten one of these yet?" she said.
Rock looked up at her and smiled. He thought she was gorgeous. "I don't think so." On the paper was a handwritten surname, Mutusak, which Rock assumed referred to a guard on Arkansas State's basketball team. "What's it for?"
"We always hand out the name of every player, completely at random, to everyone here," she said. "Whoever has the name of the first player to score wins a dollar."
Rock stuck the slip in his pocket and walked into the parking lot to look for his car's steering wheel, which he had noticed missing just as he pulled to a stop a half an hour earlier. He could not find it anywhere, but noticed when he sat in the driver's seat that it was back in place.

Flying departure

Rock was in a lobby at the old Arkansas Democrat building just as Judy walked through to pass out paychecks. She gave Rock one for $1,920. He wasn't sure why, but it looked as if someone used a pencil to write it.
"That means they're about to fire you," photographer Rick McFranklin said.
Rock wasn't sure whether McFranklin was kidding, but assumed he was since he had never heard of a contract worker being fired. Regardless, after further examination Rock realized it had been written and signed in ink.
As he left the building, Rock ran across an enormous room on the ground floor, which looked like one from a 200-year-old government building in Washington, D.C. It had two marble staircases the width of the building's interior, and Rock leaped down them from top to bottom—a drop of at least ten feet—with no trouble whatsoever, like an athletic child, and heard people behind him express amazement.

Golden Bears

Out of the blue, Rock was the quarterback for the California Golden Bears late in what would almost certainly become a blowout victory over the UCLA Bruins.
California led 67-21, there were two minutes left, and Rock was with his team in the huddle. He called a 41, which he hoped meant the tailback would plunge into the line to the immediate left of the center, just as it had for his youth-league football team in Huntsville, Alabama, back in the fall of 1969. Apparently it did. After an awkward exchange, the overweight, baby-faced back rushed up the middle for a yard or two.
Rock looked at his teammates in the subsequent huddle and smiled. "Are you guys even getting hit? It seems as if those guys are playing like a bunch of little girls."
The players grinned sheepishly, almost as though they were embarrassed by their opponent's play.
Rock next called for a 42.
"You want me to go the right?" the back said.
"Yes," Rock said.
The play called for the back to run immediately to the right of center, but he instead ran parallel to the scrimmage line until a corner opened around UCLA's defense. He cut up field near the sideline and ran at least fifty yards for a touchdown. No one was close to him when he scored.
Rock and his teammates responded with a celebration that began near midfield, but spilled into the parking lot and eventually spread across the campus. They had abandoned the game with a minute and a half left to play.
Suddenly Rock was one of the analysts in a national television studio as this bizarre circumstance unfolded in Berkeley. Though none of them were sure what the ruling would be, one thought UCLA would be allowed to play the rest of the game unopposed, during which it perhaps could score the 53 points it needed for victory. Rock said he believed California would have to forfeit.

Darkest Africa

Rock had just a little more money than needed to buy a train ticket across the jungle of a tropical country in inner, central Africa. He counted it out for a woman at a ticket office, and had no more than a handful of change left when she gave him the ticket. He needed it to go see a speech by a famous leader, who remained unnamed but had a status somewhat similar to that of former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Bed shopping

This bed was so comfortable that it almost seemed magical. Rock stretched out on it in a large mall department story, maybe a Dilliard's, and immediately knew he wanted it. He said so and was sent to an area at the store's lowest level where he could pick it up, or from which he would have it delivered, but could never find the area. He searched so long that he forgot what he was looking for.

Marshall Matt

A handful of Mexican Americans disguised to appear as if they were from the old west were with Rock as they worked on a highly complex scheme to make sure Kansas marshal Matt Dillon and Dodge City, Kansas, were receiving adequate rainfall. Someone perhaps far in the past had miscalculated, and consequently rain was being diverted from the marshal and town ninety percent more often then it should have been.
Miss Kitty Russell took special interest in double checking everyone's math.

Birthday

It was Brass' seventy-fifth birthday, and Rock felt compelled to act somewhat like an idiot to display how highly he thought of him. Brass seemed embarrassed as Rock danced around his house.

The trial

Though Rock was selected to serve on the jury, there was no real trial. A woman accused of murder was introduced and that was it. No evidence was presented. Rock convinced the other eleven jurors to vote for acquittal, and the town was in an uproar. Apparently there was no doubt to most that the woman was guilty.

Camp Robinson

Rock was with John Good and a soldier he didn't know in a warehouse at Camp Robinson. Good had retrieved several live explosive shells from an abandoned military vehicle earlier that day, and held one in his hand. He used it as evidence to support his claim that many new trainees were either careless or inept.

Ruth's return

On the final play of the game Rock's cat Ruth intercepted a pass and ran it thirty-four yards for a Seattle Seahawks touchdown. Rock was thrilled. He knew Ruth needed to score at least nine more fantasy points for him to win the $100,000 grand prize, and it appeared to Rock that she had.
Still, he watched from his bed in Levy and struggled with a simple calculation. He was nearly certain that fantasy rules awarded six points for a touchdown and one tenth of a point for each return yard, but could not convince himself that what Ruth had done added to nine or more points.
Ruth wanted out of the house. Rock wasn't sure he should let her go until the fantasy matter was settled. He also wondered whether Ruth's original owners would try to horn in on the jackpot, whose very existence he had begun to question.
Rock wasn't sure of anything. He paused to consider. Could this be real? He remembered that the preseason schedule had yet to start, and knew that no game in the history of the NFL would ever be played through daybreak, and, wait a minute, shit, cats don't play pro football.
Of course.
He let Ruth out.

Election Day

It was election day, but as Rock shopped at the Levy Kroger he thought it seemed more like the day before Thanksgiving. The store was packed with employees and shoppers, and Rock and everyone else had to walk around stacks of boxes, and workers with box cutters hacking away. There were intricately and delicately balanced displays of everything from Campbell's Soup to Kroger-brand pimento cheese all over the store, and though Rock had entered as a shopper, it became his job as a new employee to build a display, of something. He would never remember what it was.
The next morning Rock was in charge of a post-election parade. He had remote control machinery throughout his house to support his managerial responsibility, including a buzzer on his nightstand that rang every ten minutes. The buzzer—the snooze function of his alarm clock—and a cat named Jo eventually convinced him it was time to get up and take more direct care of the parade.

Ribs

Rock was at his big brother Jim's house and thought it was strange that his brother had used a raw rack of pork ribs to serve in place of a broken leg on the Habachi grill that sat in on his kitchen table. It kept the grill from wobbling, but seemed like an odd choice for the job.
When Rock returned several months later, the same rib was in place supporting the grill, though it was now thoroughly cooked. Rock asked about it. Jim laughed and said he would have to come up with a better, more permanent solution.
All the while it seemed perfectly reasonable to both that Jim sometimes cooked on a charcoal grill inside his kitchen.

Football practice

A high school football practice was underway. It was nighttime and the dark practice field's only light spilled in from a parking lot. As Rock drove his pickup truck across the grounds toward the exit, weaving his way around groups of players, he listened to a recording of a football broadcast on his in-dash cassette player, searching for a forgotten comment he heard years before and remembered liking.

Too much

There would be people on the road ahead that Rock didn't want to meet, so he decided to walk through the woods on an adjacent trail, hoping to remain unseen.
Within  fifty feet, he turned to see a mesh of gnarled roots and and tree trunks so tightly packed that he would have to squeeze between them to proceed. He did, but shortly thereafter came to a very steep hill hundreds of feet high, whose very existence was contradicted by nearby terrain familiar to Rock. He had heard of the trail's potential danger, but no one ever said anything about significant inclines.
Rock paused for a moment, looked above to see that the space was even tighter ahead, and concluded that, potential danger aside, he was unwilling to exert the effort required to continue.

Oaklawn Park

It was a much bigger payoff than Rock expected. He knew he had hit the place and show horses, but thought he bet only $2 on each. After he looked at his tickets he remembered he bet $75 on the place horse and $60 on the show horse. His total earnings were slightly less than $2,000.
An old acquaintance of Rock's named Sandy watched as Rock collected his winnings, and later reported the windfall to people in the press box. When Rock saw fellow reporter Todd and photographer Karen in an Oaklawn Park hallway, they acted delighted for him.

Texarkana

En route to cover a high school football game for the paper, Rock found a shortcut so significant that he was able to drive from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Texarkana, Arkansas, in an hour. He met the Texarkana coach in the hospitality suite before the game. "At my age, I feel lucky just to be here," the coach said. "My wife always says, 'Just make sure you don't miss the game.' "
Rock laughed. "I missed a game once," he said. "It was the Race for the Cure, twenty years ago. I overslept and got to the finish line at least half an hour after the winners. But, heck, I was there for the awards ceremony and interviewed everyone I needed to. They gave me the race story and no one ever knew I'd missed it."
"Here's one thing I notice about race stories in the paper," the coach said. "It seems like no one ever writes who finished second."

Squirt guns

It was too hot to be out, but Rock and Walt had no choice. As they walked under the midday sun across a weed-strewn vacant lot, they saw two eleven- or twelve-year-old boys run from hiding, laughing the whole time. The boys began to shoot water at Rock and Walt from large, shoulder-held squirt guns. Rock fired back with a cheap water pistol, but it only had a range of about five feet. The boys were twenty feet away and Rock and Walt were getting soaked.
The steamy weather made it easy to laugh off the assault. Rock got the boys to relax and asked them to let him examine one of their guns. It was shaped like a leaf blower, had a small gas engine, and weighed about thirty pounds. Walt agreed with Rock that it seemed impractical as an everyday squirt gun.

God lives in Levy

It's kind of crazy, but something has been arranged so that the young landscaper who lives across the street from Rock is now in charge of the earth. Crazier yet, Rock is this man's boss and can replace him at any point with anyone he chooses.
Nothing has been quite the same for Rock since he was laid off from the newspaper back in 2009, but things seem to be getting better (except that he's hungry, his left hip hurts, and he says the word "motherfucker" way more than he used to). Now all he needs to do is learn how to use his MacBook Pro to keep track of the world ruler who lives across the street.

DiGiorno and Colette

Rock tried through most of the morning to find a suitable spot on the Arkansas-Little Rock campus to start a run for the Little Rock Hash House Harriers. He discussed the matter with several Little Rock policemen, one of whom asked him to join them for lunch at Walgreens. Rock agreed, and when he walked into the store saw at least a hundred policemen seated at a lunch counter that ran along three sides of the building's interior. Hundreds of empty DiGiorno frozen pizza boxes were stacked behind them. Though all appeared perfectly normal to Rock, the battalion chief seemed compelled to explain this choice for lunch. He attempted by saying that the department saved a great deal of money because of all the leftovers the men took home with them. Rock was convinced.
As Hashing friends Don and Kayce drove him home, south on Fair Park Blvd., they told Rock of a girl they knew named Colette. "I think she's your type," Kayce said. "She's definitely petepretty."
"Man, we'd love to introduce you to her," Don said.
Rock was skeptical but pleased. He asked if they could show him a picture.
Before they responded, Rock noticed to their right a flea market opened in an abandoned strip mall. His attention was particularly drawn to several large slow-cookers, each of which contained one of a variety of stuffed animals.

Pot

Rock had enough marijuana for perhaps half a dozen hits. He found it in an ash tray earlier that evening, and now it was on the table in front of him and Loftus as they sat in a bar on Beale Street. Rock lighted a roach, pinched it between his right thumb and index finger and inhaled the smoke. He felt the buzz within seconds. Loftus said he was concerned Rock might be arrested, but Rock told him not to worry. Loftus said laws against pot were still in effect. "You could get deported," he said.
"No, Loftus," Rock said. "Nobody really cares about this stuff anymore. The cops have more important things to worry about."

The paper

There was something Rock needed to do, but he didn't know what it was and was afraid to ask anyone. He was at his large antique desk in the dark-paneled, dimly-lighted news room of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The middle-aged son of the paper's owner sat nearby, talking about something Rock couldn't quite understand. Meanwhile, Rock scribbled random thoughts on a yellow legal pad.

A big onion

To Rock there was nothing abnormal or surprising about this onion, even though it was the size of a basketball. It was exactly what he'd hoped to find when he walked into the supermarket. His plan was to come back later to buy it. He of course realized this did not fall into any ordinary grocery-store protocol, but began to look for a place to hide it. He finally decided on a spot on the floor adjacent to the display case that held all of the other onions, where he covered it with a large burlap sack.
Satisfied that he had adequately disguised the onion, Rock walked to the register to pay for a twelve-pack of soda pop. He saw a friend there from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers named Lacey, and as they stood in line he noticed she was holding a pack of cigarettes. She was a runner he had known for years, disciplined as an athlete in every way. He couldn't imagine her smoking. "Lacey, you don't smoke, do you?" he said.
Lacey explained that the pack was for someone she worked with. Rock was doubtful, but let the subject drop.

The Great War

The Great War was over; Rock heard the announcement over the radio of his B-17 and relayed it to Bill Brass, who was nearby, providing cover with his American biplane. Rock's pilot had no difficulty landing the bomber, but Brass' plane was entangled in bed sheets and the unplugged power cord of an oscillating fan. Rock freed the plane in short order and Brass flew away unharmed.

Split the wickets

They were near a sharp turn on a rural, two-lane highway at least twenty miles north of North Little Rock. Rock didn't know why they chose this spot, but he and several others had, and despite the traffic, were having enormous fun playing several tricky and physically challenging games. A tall, overweight woman named Tammy, who Rock worked with at a restaurant in Fayetteville in the early 1980s, introduced one called split the wickets, in which a player would stand with their legs spread, and another would attempt to run between them at full speed.
Rich Yeager went first, and his head struck Tammy's upper thighs so hard that he fell to the road. Rock and the others laughed at the slapstick, but their laughter stopped when at least five large, young, menacing-looking black men began to approach them from a red Chevrolet Malibu, which one of them had just parked thirty feet away.
Rock was fearful, and immediately walked toward his car. Twenty feet before he reached it, he saw several young black women standing near his driver's side door. They had not taken an aggressive posture, so Rock felt he could reach his car without interference. Nevertheless, he remained very concerned about the men from the Malibu.

High-dollar sushi

Four or five women in their early to mid-twenties, dressed in the style of the goth or emo subcultures, were with Rock in a crowded downtown bar. He sat directly across the table from a particularly pretty and sexy blonde, who spoke to him about the sushi served at a nearby restaurant. She said it cost $700. "If someone bought me that sushi, he could do anything he wanted with me," she said.
Rock believed he saw in her a look of interest, though his thoughts blended with sudden commentary from the other women. They agreed the idea of $700 sushi sounded ridiculous. Rock concurred, but he was aroused by the blonde's comment and briefly weighed the cost against the potential return.

Electrical outlets

Rock's life depended on whether or not the oscillating fan in his bedroom was plugged in. If the people with the British accents instructed him to leave it unplugged, he would survive. Otherwise he would not. Whether or not Rock's laptop computer was plugged in bore on their instructions, but Rock was unclear how. He considered, and at last decided to leave his laptop plugged in. He never received final instructions from the British-sounding people, but chose to leave the fan unplugged and felt safe.

Roommates

Rock and Zach roomed together, upstairs in an old two-story house subdivided into several apartments. Rock realized one day that their bathroom was filthy. Feces and toilet paper floated in the yellowish brown water that trickled across the rim of the commode onto the floor, which was littered with towels and old papers and magazines. Zach was in the living room-den when Rock approached to ask if he would help him clean. "We don't need to fuck with that," Zach said. "This place is fine."
"Do what? Have you looked in the bathroom?"
"What about it?"
"Man, there are turds floating in the toilet."
"So what? It still flushes. Besides, we'll be going home in a few days."

Track meet

It was the most extravagant display of showboating that Rock had ever seen.
He was covering a track meet for the paper at Scott Field in Little Rock, and watched from the press box as a boy approached the final turn of the 800-meter run with a lead of nearly 150 meters. The boy looked back to the field far behind, then casually slowed to a stop. He began to chat with one of the pole vaulters. He picked up a basketball from the infield and dribbled it on the track. As the rest of the runners closed in on him, he passed the basketball to one of the vaulters thirty feet away, who drove for a layup at a goal which suddenly appeared where the vault pit had been.
"Give him the assist!" someone in the press box shouted. Laughter reined.
The boy began running again just as the field passed him and retook the lead in the middle of the turn.

Russellville High

Rock was going back to take classes at Russellville High School. He picked an outfit of khaki pants and a sweater with horizontal pastel stripes from racks placed in meadow of long and willowy grass near the school. His classmates from nearly forty years earlier also were there.

World Cup

The Germans led 3-nil late in the World Cup game with the Americans. The Americans were down to one player—Rock, who had never played soccer and was clearly outmanned.
In the next instant Rock was in his living room in Levy watching the game on television. He was thirsty and had to pee; he knew there was little chance the lone American on the field would succeed and consequently became disinterested.

Recumbent bikes

After Jenny and Erin met Rock at a picnic, they introduced him to a game that involved recumbent bicycles and put him on a cell phone with one of its proponents. The game seemed odd, apparently requiring a very precise and slow loop around a course that took no more than a minute to complete. Though he had never before ridden a recumbent bike and did not fully grasp the rules of the game, Rock set a record with his first attempt. He was nevertheless completely unimpressed by this new sport.

Ruth

Rock's cat Ruth was the favorite but finished a disappointing third in the biggest horse race of the period, which felt as if it were the Kentucky Derby, though it wasn't. Among Rock's friends, no one seemed more upset than Bob McKinney. Ruth, who wore the red No. 1, lagged behind from the start and never contended.

Triple jump

As Rock walked down the aisle of a church toward the door, he suddenly felt an urge to triple jump. This had once been a common feeling for him, perhaps twenty years earlier. It struck again and he triple jumped through the door, landing on a walkway in front of the church. He noticed with interest that he seemed to float through the jump phase, as if he defied gravity.
Minutes later he felt the same sensation as he triple jumped across the dark brown tile floor of the church's banquet hall. He spoke there afterward with a friend from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers named Ronnie.

The Guiding Light

It was one of those stories Rock had told for years, usually to the amusement of his audience.
This time he was with a gathering of family and friends seated around a backyard table and under a large umbrella. Among the half dozen or so there were a Little Rock Hasher namded Emon and Rock's cousin Nita. After Nita said she spends a part of each day watching her "shows," Rock reminisced about the only soap opera he had followed and how he chose it.
Early in the summer of 1978, while staying with relatives in Russellville, Arkansas, he spent a day judging all the soaps based on the prettiness of their actresses. The hands-down winner was The Guiding Light, which he watched off-and-on for the next two or three years.
Everyone thought Rock's story was humorous, but no one more than Emon, who laughed hysterically.

Tires

These guys were driving entirely too fast.
Three cars passed Rock's Impala on I-30, headed north, approaching downtown Little Rock at ninety miles an hour. Two hundred yards in front of Rock, as they drove side-by-side in the three lanes, the car to the left veered into the middle car, and in a chain reaction the three vehicles smashed into one another and began to careen across the highway. They rolled and flipped in an explosive shatter of metal. Rock veered to the left shoulder, hoping to avoid the melee. He did, but his front tires were ripped from their wheels as they rolled through the debris.
Rock walked across the I-30 Arkansas River bridge and down the first ramp to Broadway in North Little Rock, where he turned right, or east, and walked another block to a tire store he was familiar with. He and a friendly, graying overweight woman clerk Rock had known for years joked as she sold him two new tires for a total of about $45.

Secretariat

Rock sat on press row at a college basketball game at Florida International in Miami beside a young writer named Troy from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
As Troy made out with an older woman, who leaned over from the court across his laptop, Rock tried to count the bills in his wallet. He pulled out one that was severely damaged and turned to the crowd of writers around him to ask if they thought it would still spend. He recognized one of them from a trip he had made to Miami fifteen years earlier.
"You've worked here a long time, haven't you?" Rock said.
He was disappointed the writer showed no sign of recognition.
Shortly thereafter he was at a horse race, which was apparently significant. There were only three very old horses in the field, but one was Secretariat. The other two entrants collapsed on the back stretch shortly after the race started. Secretariat also fell several times, but recovered to win.
Rock did not seem to think there was anything odd about watching a race won by a horse who had been dead for nearly twenty-five years.

Crawling

Rock recalled dreaming, but memories from his sleep are nonexistent. He believes they were obscured by the titanic crawl forced upon him by extreme hypoglycemia.
His first awareness appeared while he was sprawled on the bathroom floor at about 6 a.m., where he gasped for breath and began a horseshoe-shaped, counterclockwise 20-foot crawl to his refrigerator. He sprained his right wrist and hurt his right knee and right foot on the way to several gulps of grapefruit juice and then several more of grape juice. Rock had no choice but to urinate as he sat on the tile floor of his kitchen. The juice began to register on his blood glucose. After perhaps five minutes he gained enough balance to wobble his way upright to his back bedroom.
It occurred to Rock several hours later that this was as bad as it's been for him, as he sat sore and scared, ready to watch the final round of the U.S. Open.
His ankle and knee would hurt for days.*

*this was not a dream, rather a hypoglycemic event somewhat common to Rock's real life

Perspective

Rock seemed saddened by the state of his life, but his 84-year-old father told him to take a look around. He reminded Rock that most of the world's population would be delighted to own, outright, a house like his, and to have his financial portfolio. Rock couldn't imagine anything he owned or was capable of that pleased him, before his father and a few swallows of grape juice changed his mind.

Booby traps

There was a man in Rock's house taking a course from room to room and chair to chair. The objective for Rock was to catch him. He knew that much, but not to what effect, though he suspected he might be in some sort of jeopardy as he dream-walked in pursuit. He never saw anyone.
In the next instant, Rock learned that booby-traps were set throughout his house, and he had to negotiate them upon waking in order to weigh himself. He was quite satisfied to find his scales, weigh in at 187 pounds, and finally recognize he was under the spell of hypoglycemia. Four ounces of grape juice later, Rock was perking green tea.

Finances

Rock was a new employee with a financial firm whose clients were enjoying a banner morning. Two people called to ask how they should respond to the day's grand news from Wall Street, and Rock, consistent with his lifelong habits of money management, suggested they remain cautious. He hung up and discussed the meaning of these early numbers with a man he assumed was his boss. They were alone in the office. It was dimly lighted as though it were night.
When Rock rose to walk to the bathroom, past his cat Jo, he was disappointed to see it was 8:30 a.m. and thus too late to join the Geezers at Burns Park to discuss with them the significance of this windfall.