An authur's age

The publishing firm asked Rock to determine the age of its authors, but his only gauge was their physical appearance, and the only evidence he had was a stack of mug shots. He thought they all looked younger than thirty.

Stab wounds

He was on a sidewalk in front of a bar in an old, rundown former warehouse district in east Little Rock when Rock saw several men apprehend Ashley, a woman he had known ten years earlier. One of the men picked her up and put her on the back of a flatbed truck. Another pulled out a large kitchen knife and stuck it into one of her thighs several times, directly through her blue jeans.
As Ashley screamed and struggled, Rock hurried in horror into the smokey bar, which was crowded with bedraggled, middle-aged men. "I need a knife. Someone please get me the largest, sharpest kitchen knife you can find," said Rock, who was already ashamed of his cowardice.

Grilled chicken

Friends and their pets were packed in Rock's house, which was far too hot. His had spent the night grilling chicken, and the coals had done a better job heating his house than cooking the thick chicken breasts. They were only now, at daybreak, beginning to reach a point where they were safe to eat.

Exploitation

Someone lent Todd Traub a small airplane, and he used it to fly Rock across the sparse, dusty terrain near Oklahoma City. They were there to attend the Great American Conference preseason football meetings.
Todd landed the plane in the parking lot of Mexican restaurant, which he and Rock entered to see four sexy and scantily clad Latino women standing on the edge of section of tables two steps higher than the majority of seating in the restaurant. There were several women from the conference who had gathered nearby to complain.
"This is exploitation, pure and simple," one of them said.
They all agreed. Todd and Rock did not, and in fact struck up a conversation with the women who had caught their attention in the first place.

Booze

It disappointed Rock to read that his old friend Kelly Bass had been dismissed from Harding University's football team for excessive drinking. Apparently school officials ran tests that confirmed Kelly had consumed an average of six beers a day over the previous month.
What disturbed Rock even more was a montage of photographs the paper ran on the jump page. It showed hundreds of former Arkansas athletes, each with either a drink or marijuana in their hands. There was one of Rock, taken twenty-two years earlier, as he drew pot smoke from a joint in front of Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati.