An embarrassment

 There were characters in Rock's house he recognized from several Star Trek television series, including Reginald Barkley, an oddball from a handful of episodes of The Next Generation and Voyager. Someone told Rock this would be a long-term arrangement, set up for no more than a test of its durability. It all seemed unbelievable, and Rock wondered how long he could avoid the embarrassment of a house filled with adults dressed in uniforms from the United Federation of Planets. This might be enough to make his property a Levy laughingstock.

A shout for help

 Until the boy slid in mud to the bottom of a deep ditch near the fieldhouse, everything had gone well for Rock as he began work on a preseason story about Oak Grove High's football team. Oak Grove's coaches were glad to see him, and most of the players remembered him from the season before. One of those players was a typical overweight lineman, an African American underclassman who stumbled near the top of the fifteen-foot ditch into boulders, slick grime, and the two or three feet of water at its base. He lay motionless. "Do you think he's okay?" a coach said. "No, I don't believe so," Rock said as he began his slide toward the player. The boy appeared unconscious, perhaps dead, when Rock reached him. Rock lifted the boy's head from the water and shouted for help.

The Downtown Y

 The Downtown Little Rock YMCA closed in 1994, and Rock was surprised to see how much its interior had dilapidated. One of the basketball courts was dank, dingy, and strewn with cobwebs. Water dripped from the dark ceiling, just above the old wooden one-hundred and sixty-yard track that circled the court's perimeter, twenty feet above. Rock was last in this building a year before it was shuttered, there to interview a high school basketball player with a transplanted heart, and now he couldn't remember how to exit. He took the closest door he saw from the court and walked into a sparkling new room with a skylight above its fantastically complex weight machine. As he entered, he noticed a twin bed, dresser, and desk several steps above the weights. Just as it registered he might be in someone's private room, a college-aged man walked in. "Is this your room?" Rock said. The youngster looked frightened, and he stepped back out to the street and pulled the door shut behind him. Rock hoped the police wouldn't come.

A new game

A gaming consortium of several highly intelligent men had enlisted Rock and his cat Joe to participate in something akin to fantasy football, though they told Rock this new game was far more complex. Before he committed, he realized the group wanted Joe, not him, and it soon became clear that Joe and another recent recruit had specific areas of genius adequate to insure victory no matter the opponent. Rock was  confused but pleased to learn of his cat's rare, perhaps unique, ability. Joe seemed indifferent.

A financial nightmare

Rock bet a few long-shot horses at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort. He missed their races but later saw he had won literally hundreds of millions of dollars, so much that he was baffled by what to do. Oaklawn's mutual department deposited the money into his checking account, and Rock knew enough about finances and routine security measures to guess there might be a safer place for his new fortune. He was suddenly filthy rich, but the complexity of it all, and potential tax implications, panicked him in oddly nightmarish ways.

Penniless

Apparently Rock had done some online banking and changed several of his investment strategies while he was asleep, and he awoke at about five a.m. to realize his net worth was significantly diminished. He found his laptop on an ottoman in the den but couldn't remember any of the websites he needed or even which browser he used. The urgency of all this was clear to him. Not only was the quality of his retirement in jeopardy, but he faced the possibility of pennilessness before daybreak.

Facebook Joe

Well before daybreak, shortly after he awoke to his alarm clock, it occurred to Rock that no one had taken a photograph of his cat Joe and him. Someone had posted such pictures on Facebook for the last several days to exhibit Joe's sound sleep, a trait contrary to his heretofore rambunctious early-morning behavior.
As Rock reached the hall, he was suddenly panicked. There were pictures on Facebook of him getting up in the morning, complete with his wild hair and underpants? He headed straight for his laptop, but to his great relief, knew better before he could turn it on.

House work

One of the contractors Rock hired to work on his house had subcontracted Rock's cat Pam to work three to four hours a night for $13 an hour. That sounded like an awful lot to pay a housecat, particularly Pam. As far as Rock could tell, she was currently on the clock and sound asleep on his front bedroom bed.

Oblivion

It was an unimaginably difficult golf hole. Steeply downhill from tee box to green, the fairway was made of a slick countertop-like material, perhaps granite or an artificial equivalent. The hole looked about three-hundred yards long, so Rock figured it was Par 4.
His first tee shot had rolled the length of the hole and sped into oblivion over the small hard green. Joe Ralston, an assistant pro at the course, laughed along with a course maintenance worker at the expected result and watched as Rock tried to walk back to the tee box.
Nearly halfway up the fairway, Rock realized it was far too steep to climb. In fact, balance had become an issue. He was at least a hundred yards above a rocky base and did not know what to do to avoid a potentially deadly fall. 

A truckstop in Clarksville

Rock was seated next to John Madden, the Professional Football Hall of Fame coach who now coached Rock's high school football team. They were at a truckstop in Clarksville, Arkansas, once a fried chicken paradise Rock thought had been closed for at least twenty years.
There was no doubt what he would order, but Rock recommended the ribeye steak for Coach Madden.
"It comes with this sauce made out of horseradish, mayonnaise, and buttermilk, which is out of this world," Rock said.
Madden seemed unconvinced.

The Great Donna

The Great Donna Falkenhain had been kidnapped, but Rock learned she would be released in exchange for former Russian President Boris Yeltsin somewhere in Levy later that Sunday morning. He found out she told someone she would wait for her husband at Rock's house.
It was not yet dusk, but it was near enough to daylight for Rock to search for more news. Before it occurred to him that this consternation was no more than a byproduct of dreamful sleep, he took a minute to sweep the floor in his den.

Soccer

Rock had never faced a newspaper challenge like this. It was just past dusk on Saturday when he remembered he had agreed to fill a page in the Sunday paper with an in-depth summary of the state high school soccer season. Four stories were due by early evening on a sport Rock had never followed.
He could not name a high school soccer player or coach, yet he would have to write stories on the best of each, boys and girls, and also compile all-state teams. Provided he could reach at least a handful of authorities, this was not an impossible task, but Rock would have to start from a standpoint of complete ignorance.

Hard to breathe

There was a way by which the entire historical human population could be represented by two-square-inch rectangles of aluminum pressed together and formed into an ever-expanding globe in Rock's back bedroom.
Shortly after it was begun, the globe began to grow so rapidly that Rock was pressed against the back wall of the room. He found it hard to breathe. Panic came in short order.

Nearly magical

Rock was with a handful of friends in a church auditorium to watch some sort of presentation. He couldn't remember exactly what the coming program would encompass, but he was at least temporarily indifferent. These friends of his, apparently spearheaded by Erin, the only one among them he would later recall, had arranged for him to sit beside a somewhat distinguished-looking middle-aged woman.
These friends sat on a pew immediately behind Rock and watched as the woman introduced herself.
"I'm an actress," she said. "I have made a lot of money over the years. I am, you know, really quite wealthy. My last name is so complex I don't believe you would ever learn to correctly pronounce it. My first name is, on the other hand, while considerably rare, is nothing you would have any particular trouble learning to say. Furthermore, I have always thought it was quite lovely."
Rock glanced back toward his acquaintances with a quizzical look intentionally exaggerated for the sake of humor. He wondered if this was all a setup, a practical joke of some sort.
"My parents explained to me that first names like mine were central to success," the actress continued. "There is something special—nearly magical—about its soothing and colorful sound that appeals not only to the elite but to the masses as well. They were from..."
Rock at last interrupted to ask the woman in a tone that clearly requested she please, oh god, tell him her goddamn name.
"It's Ashland," she said. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I always go on and on like that sometimes. It's something I have done forever. I have begun to work toward getting more to the point in my conversations, but it's  always been difficult for me to find..."

Nice haircuts

Rock had written something critical of the Arkansas Razorbacks' baseball team in a story published by the paper, and he subsequently ran into the school's sports information director at a minor-league baseball game in North Little Rock.
They were longtime, somewhat close acquaintances, and Rock teasingly behaved as if he were trying to avoid his friend.
"We weren't all that bad, were we?" the SID said. "Besides, even if we were, you didn't put anywhere in there about all the nice haircuts our guys have."

Scared

Rock did not at first debate that there was a nearly unimaginably evil force on the way, headed around the world from east to west. It was beyond mankind's control, and with the evidence available to him, involved fire and extreme heat brought by some otherworldly force. His house had already begun to exhibit hints of a coming flame.
As far as Rock could figure, this vicious, omnipotent power had no voice, but it nonetheless spoke clearly. He was not mistaken. Awful, life-ending, torturous destruction would soon arrive.
Rock struggled with balance as he searched for Joe, the big Orange Street cat who had lived with him for nearly a year. It seemed important to find him. Rock knew how scared they would both be, though—wait a minute—the news on TV seemed incongruously encouraging. He was frightened beyond reason by the approaching fire, but Rock watched these odd men express more concern for America's cumulative pocketbook than its seemingly inevitable flame-filled finish.
"What is this, Joe?" Rock said.
The cat was asleep on their couch.

The debate

Someone Rock didn't know tried to convince him that all that was required for entry into a house or room was a knock, or the equivalent, even if the door was locked. It made no sense to Rock, who asked why anyone would bother with locks if this were the case.
The debate endured beyond daybreak, until Rock fell and hurt his right foot in a last-second twist to avoid impaling his chest on a steering-wheel lock near his desk.

Hole-in-one

Evidence of Rock's hole-in-one was there for everyone to see. He left the ball in the cup on the approximately 30-yard par-three, and it was obvious to his neighbors and anyone who reviewed the internet video of his shot. It clearly bounced off a rock near a neighbor's driveway and directly into the cup.
The ball was there hours later. Other golfers complained as they played through, but no one removed it.

The deal

Someone at the Arkansas Activities Association had given coaches an opportunity to replay the final minutes of a famous high school championship football game from the 1980s, and it all seemed perfectly reasonable to Rock and the coaches.
The key issue was a punt play late in the game in which the coach of the receiving team was allowed to decide whether the ball should be punted again. No one could remember what had happened in the first place, but the general consensus was that the play had no meaningful bearing on the outcome of the game.
This old coach—the overweight, gray-haired, sadly weathered man all coaches become—said they should just let the thing from all those years ago stand. The deal was, he would have to field the punt himself.
"I don't think that would turn out well," he said.

A reenactment

Rock had carefully set into motion a computerized reenactment of his morning routine, but there remained flaws. It was essential he remove them or forego any use of the program. His safety relied on an accurate representation.
This cycle of activity repeated itself nearly every morning: Rock would get up at about 5 a.m. to use the bathroom. After he returned to bed, his cat Joe, awakened from his shallow sleep, would begin to walk laps around Rock's pillow. Rock would toss Joe from the bed two or three times, a futile effort that inevitably proceeded his placement of Joe on the front porch. Rock would get up for good a couple of hours later and let Joe back in.
He had hoped the program would allow him to remain asleep, but apparently, Joe found it all unnecessary.

The way there

This moped had sat in Rock's garage for years. He thought it would be fun to ride it to the Little Rock Hash event underway at the large city park between his house and the U.S. Pizza in Levy, but first, he would have to fill up its gas tank.
The nearest gas station was at the corner of Pershing and Pike Avenues, at the base of the climb up Pershing to Fort Roots. All the way there, Rock was troubled by the moped's controls, particularly the accelerator, which was a pedal below and behind his right foot. It was easy to miss and hard to depress, and he struggled with it as he crossed Pike and rode the bike up into the minimart parking lot.
As he approached a pump, Rock noticed there was no tire on his front axle. He couldn't imagine how he had ridden so far on nothing but a dented, oddly-shaped wheel rim.

Coronavirus

Everyone was sick. The trainers, the horses, Rock, and half the people in the Oaklawn press box felt awful. A trainer named Robertino Diodoro joked that the coronavirus had found its way to Hot Springs. All Rock knew for sure was that it had been sixteen years and eleven months since he had been this ill
The stakes for Arkansas-bred horses was scheduled for early Sunday morning, but it looked as if it would be postponed until at least the horses began to feel better. Either way, Rock didn't want to get out of bed. He hoped his cat Joe didn't get sick, all curled up as he was beside Rock's pillow in Levy.

Deeply engaged

Rock's father Richard was deeply engaged in a novel. He sat across from Rock in a small cafe that could have doubled as a library. It was time to go, Rock knew. His mother Jane was in their car in the parking lot, but his father was consumed by the book, so much so that he made notes on a yellow legal pad as he read.
Rock finally got him to agree to leave, but as they walked toward the car, Rock noticed an offtrack betting facility in a wing of the strip mall to his left. He had completely forgotten there was a bet he intended to make, an exacta on two horses who were currently at odds of 5-1 and 7-1. The place had a tote board on its roof, visible in the dark of six p.m. all the way to Central Avenue.

Just sit put

Someone had set up some kind of run for the Little Rock Hash House Harriers that did not require their actual participation. They could just sit put, or lie prone, and feel as if they were on the run.
Rock was with a group not far from his house on a run up and down steep wooded hills, and yet he could sense his cat Joe curled in a ball next to a pillow tucked under his head on his back bedroom bed.

Thunderstorm

As a thunderstorm rolled through Levy late on a Tuesday night, Rock lay in his back-bedroom bed. He tried to watch a cops-and-robbers shootout on a black-and-white television he didn't know he owned, but the loud thunder interfered with the show.
There was something else, too. Voices from his dead neighbor Tom's backyard and perhaps, yes, gunfire. Real gunfire. Rock was suddenly filled with panic.

Cats

The trick was to pick up the cats and place them in one of several large plastic pitchers of lemonade Rock's uncle Jim Aikman had placed on a picnic table near the softball field. The idea, introduced by Jim, was to turn the cats into softball players, which made perfect sense to Rock.
"The only thing I don't understand is, how are they able to hold a bat?" Rock said.
He asked this as he struggled with a very aggressive, shaggy fifteen-pound yellow version of the cats around the table. There would be no getting this flailing animal into a pitcher of lemonade, he thought, but before his assessment took hold and Jim answered his question, Rock could see that one of the cats had grown to the size of a typical outfielder. Its hands had opposable thumbs. He wore a pinstriped uniform and had already begun to take practice swings.
Rock also noticed the pitchers were the size of garbage cans. All he would have to do is drop this crazed cat in.

An oversight

Someone tried to enlist Rock's help in a count of consecutive NCAA Division I indoor track and field championships won by the Arkansas Razorbacks, but he had no idea. He didn't even know they were on any kind of meaningful streak.
Sure, Rock and everyone else in Arkansas understood the significance of the Razorbacks' reign as the nations' premiere track program, a nearly forty-year run begun in 1982, five-years after the school hired John McDonnell as its head track coach. Rock knew much about it, but these people said the indoor team had won somewhere in the neighborhood of one-hundred or more consecutive national championships. They showed him charts and graphs on his laptop. It was clear the streak was very long, but Rock couldn't figure out how to find its length. There were no obvious lists, which seemed an incredible oversight. Why had these people come to him, he wondered.

Carry

Grouped with Arkansas State Golf Association president Jay Fox and two of his carbon-copy golfing friends, Rock's drive traveled nearly five-hundred yards. They were on the first hole of a course unfamiliar to Rock, an uphill par-five that demanded carry over its entire length. Most of what should have been a fairway was a rock-strewn, narrow hiking trail that led to a green at least one-hundred feet above the tee box.
None of Rock's partners had seen his drive, but the ball was about five feet short and right of the green. He pointed it out to Jay, who—along with his friends—seemed unimpressed, even put out a bit.

Types of meat

He did not know why, but Rock had agreed to buy three tubular, metal containers, each filled with at least a gallon of micro-brewed beer, and three stacks of sandwich meat, each several inches thick.
Rock was with fellow sportswriter Tim Cooper in an old grocery store that also sold hardware and outdoor supplies, similar to a classic southern general store. Apparently, the owner, an overweight man in a dirty white apron was responsible for Rock's purchases. He had shown him a choice of several types of meat, huge piles of each on sheets of wax paper, and some beer Rock knew he would not like but could not resist.
"Your the first person who ever turned down bacon," the grocer said.
"I can get bacon anywhere," Rock said.
As he walked with the meat and beer toward his car, Rock couldn't imagine why he had purchased this stuff. He wondered if Coop would take it.

Incredible worry

After a careful examination of the internet report of his utility bills on his laptop, Rock realized he had long paid water bills for at least two friends with the Little Rock Hash House Harriers. One was a seventy-five-year-old man named Bob McKinney, who lived in a four-hundred thousand dollar west Little Rock home and had multiple adult children and many grandchildren. The other was a former girlfriend named Jenny Devine, who now lived with her husband—an airline pilot for Delta—and two teenaged children in a New Jersey suburb of New York City.
This seemed incredible. Rock knew his own water bill had run twenty-five dollars a month for the last seventeen years, but he didn't think he could possibly have paid fifty dollars a month for the last twenty without knowing it.
He was awake now, sitting in 9 a.m. daylight on his living room couch. Rock walked into his bathroom and saw that his cat Joe had shredded toilet paper that hung toward the floor from the roller on the wall above. He figured this was somehow correlated to his having cut off another Hasher's electricity bill he had also paid for years.
Rock wondered why he wasn't broke, but his worry gradually dispersed as he began to more-clearly realize none of these things were possible.

Full-frontal nudity

Rock had watched television reruns most of his life, beginning with Sky King in 1962, followed by I Love Lucy, My Three Sons, Andy Griffith, with a middling period dominated by Coach, the Star Trek renewals, and, of course, Seinfeld, all the way to The King of Queens, but he had never seen this particular program, or even heard of it, which kind of shocked him.
In his den in Levy, right before him, was a Seinfeld episode with full-frontal nudity. Jerry and Elaine walked around in Jerry's apartment buck naked. The thing was, it was actually kind of funny, and also a bit gross, both characterizations augmented by each actor's new obesity.
This show aired thirty years earlier, and Rock couldn't imagine how he had never known about it.

Just like that

It came to Rock's attention that the talk-radio station he had worked for nearly thirty years earlier had shut down its programming. Just like that, overnight, the station had let all its employees go and begun to present a format of dead air.
Aging members of Rock's former audience—mostly sentimental old men—asked him to volunteer for a mid-morning shift and, just like that, he was behind a microphone at ten in the morning on a signal that covered more than half the state's population. He was totally unprepared, and already people called to ask his take on matters he knew nothing about.
During Rock's run as a radio host, he took hours to memorize names and statistics, like a serious science student on evenings and mornings before tests. On this day, he had no choice but to wing his answers. The difference in this circumstance was that everyone, including listeners, understood. He was consequently at ease.

The Cleveland Browns

Andy Reid, head coach for the NFL's Cleveland Browns, had not been able to find a placekicker willing to so much as kick an extra point for his team. He finally settled on a black and gray tabby housecat, but with a game on the line, the cat was curled up near the endzone in Rock's living room-den, next to a long white couch that had been knocked back into a dining area adjacent to the kitchen.
The cat would not wake up. Obviously, kicking a football was out of the question.
Rock soon realized this had gone on for most of the season, and in fact had begun to draw national attention. Television crews wanted in, so he decided to move the couch and coffee table back into place and restack a pile of books that were strewn across the den's large burgundy rug.

Coach Sieg

Athletes from UALR's track teams were spread across Verizon Arena in North Little Rock. Rock hadn't been in the facility since the winter and spring of 2009 when he covered the Arkansas Twisters' final season of arena football and had wandered in through the back bay door just to look around.
Rock's attention was drawn first by two young men as they sprinted above him, each on two translucent six-inch-wide strips of plastic, stretched six inches apart, fifteen feet above the floor of the facility.
Before he could find anyone to ask about this anomaly, he heard a familiar voice.
"Hey, Rock. How've you been?"
Rock turned to see a man he immediately recognized as the last of the Twisters' head coaches.
"Hey Coach, I'm fine," Rock said. "It's good to see you again, man."
Typical of this experience, common now in the twilight of Rock's long career as a sportswriter, here was another of the thousands of coaches or athletes from his experience whose names he could not remember, at least not immediately. He dug deep, and quickly, to remember this man's last name was perhaps Siegfried. Yes. He had called him Coach Sieg.
"Same here, Rock. Do you still write for the paper?"
"I do, Coach Sieg. How about you? What are you doing these days?"
"For the time being, not much," he said. "In fact, I'm looking for work. Do you know if the Twisters have an opening?"
"Coach. Didn't you know? The Twisters haven't played since your last season here, you know, whenever that was, ten years ago."