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.