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.