Real time

He wasn't sure why, but Rock had been asked to reenact a great deal of his past. There was no way for him to know when he began, but he suspected he was getting close to the present. It was daylight in his back bedroom and, according to his watch, Monday morning.
Rock was in his kitchen, making coffee. He was nearly certain this was real time and not something he had lived through before.

No cheering

Stadium seating was set up in a bus station, and Rock and people scattered throughout the facility were watching a football game that involved the Washington Redskins. There was no doubt Rock wanted the Redskins to win, and he couldn't help but cheer out loud for them.
A woman seated near one of the many television sets tried to shush him, which seemed odd to Rock. He wondered why anyone would care one way or the other.
The Redskins scored, and Rock cheered once again. This time the woman seemed angered. "Shhhhh," she uttered as loudly as possible.
"Ma'am, I am not going to not cheer," Rock said, though somewhat weakly, as though he were losing his voice.
"Yes you are," she said.

Church group

The men in Rock's church congregation were in a habit of gathering in line near his bathroom to await results of some sort. It wasn't clear what, at least not to Rock, but he had grown somewhat self-conscious with these strangers in his house on Sunday mornings.
He decided they might be interested in a long-drive competition, only not today. It was raining outside, and Pam wanted in.

Practice cats

A high school football coach somewhere in the Little Rock metropolitan area had worked out a way to use house cats in his practices, and Rock and an old friend named Rex Nelson showed up to see how.
It was overcast and bitterly cold out, so the practice had been moved inside the school's gymnasium. Rock and Rex walked in through a crowd of football players and worked their way to the back of the gym where a table was set up for the press.
Two units of players worked through drills in front of them. As they did, at least a dozen cats sat behind the players on a row of old wooden school chairs. They seemed uncommonly patient for cats, yet eager to participate.

Team captain

As this experience unfolded, it seemed unimaginable to Rock that anyone would choose to become the captain of the Arkansas Razorbacks and Lady Razorbacks track and cross country teams. Nevertheless, he was it.
Practice was over for the day, and Rock was required to direct an apparently daily ritual that involved running miles of laps from the UA campus to downtown Fayetteville and back. This potentially endless process included a progressive state of undress for Rock. He wondered why he had never heard of such an insane tradition, apparently put in place by legendary but long-since retired Arkansas track coach John McDonnell.
All at once, late in the afternoon, Rock was at his house in Levy, and the sun was coming up. He ate a PayDay bar, established it was Friday morning, and then went back to bed.

About to be shot

Cars and pickup trucks were backed up for the new car wash just opened off Camp Robinson Drive near the southern edge of Levy. Rock took his place behind several vehicles in a driveway to wait to enter a bay door that led into the two-story prefab metal building and its ramp to the second-floor washrooms.
The driveway wasn't quite wide enough to accommodate more than one lane of traffic. Consequently, anyone who wanted to drive past the bay door to the parking lot had to wait for cars in line. Rock was unaware of this until a car pulled in directly behind his old Ford. Within a few seconds, he heard the driver shout, "You better get the fuck out of my way."
Rock was startled, and then frightened when he felt something hard pressed against his head. He turned to see the barrel of a gun held by a very large Arkansas State Trooper, whose face was reddened and creviced with anger. Rock knew he was about to be shot.

The rock wall

A wall of artificial stones gave Rock a scenic option for his descent from school to his apartment. Most of the other university students who lived in the complex used it, though there was a less strenuous route along a sidewalk that went around the wall.

Rock had begun to descend it from school one day when he noticed a blonde-headed man climbing toward him. The man, dressed in dark clothing, scowled. His hands were tucked into the pockets of his black pea coat, and he stared at Rock as they approached each other. Rock was immediately wary. Whereas the wall offered relatively safe lanes, it was steep, with single switch-back trails that would make it easy for anyone to dislodge anyone else. He knew it would offer this man a simple opportunity to push him to serious injury and perhaps death if their paths crossed. He decided to turn back to walk around on the sidewalk.
He kept the man in sight, though, and watched him begin to pick up rocks the size of baseballs and throw them at other students near the top of the wall.

City fair

Small city fairs like this one had delighted  Rock throughout his lifetime. Exhibits, vendors, and carnival rides were placed around a small lake near downtown, and hundreds of people wandered around them through tall old oaks and evergreens.
He knew lots of people there—Little Roch Hashers, several classmates from high school and college, and a pretty young woman from the Arkansas Traveller 100-Miler, who worked a kiosk selling snowcones and fruit-flavored soft drinks. Rock thought she was beautiful, but he couldn't remember her name, and she showed no sign of recognition as he filled a large paper cup with red punch.

The man

This man in Rock's bedroom, with a nearly textbook homeless look, unkempt, unshaven, with wild hair and filthy, tattered clothing, held a wastepaper basket full of food refuge and old snuff residue, and he began to dump it on Rock's bed.
Rock didn't know who he was or why he was making this mess, but the man was clearly angered. It seemed obvious that he had come to pick a fight.
"What are you doing, man?" Rock said.
The man shoved Rock's chest. Rock reached up to separate his arms and push him away. The man then reached under the bed and grabbed a crystal dinner glass full of some sort of paper product, stained brown and powdery years earlier by tobacco spit.
"I've heard about you," the man said. "I've heard what your neighbors say."
"What the fuck are you talking about, man? You need to get the fuck out of my house."

Hardwood

Major work was underway in Rock's house. He walked into his vast living room to see that all of his furniture and the large rug were gone. There was sheet rock leaned against walls in the living room and kitchen. His mother Jane was in the kitchen, dressed in jeans and an old flannel shirt. She held a can of paint and a brush.
"We have a lot to do," she said.
"No kidding," Rock said. "I guess we should get to it."
He walked back into the living room and noticed that its hardwood floor was filthy and heavily scratched. On an area near the kitchen, it looked as if parts of it were stained with splotches of black tar or tree sap.
"Man, I wonder where this stuff came from," he said.
He knew it would be tough to scrub away, but his first job would require a broom and dustpan and a good deal of time. The floor was at least twenty-five hundred square feet.

The system

There was a system set into place in Rock's house that would ensure the disposal of large, unwanted items on the day city trucks came by to haul such things away. What's more, it became apparent at daybreak that the same system had also aided Rock's interaction with his offensive linemen during his years as a professional quarterback.
Rock remembered that he had invited several of the linemen over for lunch. Clearly, it was time to get up. He figured he would have to call out for pizza.

Toys for the office

It was apparent that someone had brought two high-tech looking toys, which Rock noticed as soon as he walked into the coaches' office.
"What the heck are these?" he said.
"They are dangerous toys is what they are," said a young, blonde-headed coach with undisguised contempt in his voice.
They were new to Rock. One was shaped like a spaceship, with yellow plastic gull wings two feet across and a red fuselage about three feet long. The other was a three-foot tall gray plastic robot with a flesh-tone head in a gray helmet.
It seemed each were designed to roll around the floor in pursuit of whoever happened to be up and moving about, which for the moment was Rock.
"Watch out," said one of the coaches, a light-skinned, likable African American with a tight, almost red afro. "Those things will start firing on you, and it kind of hurts."
Another coach stood to demonstrate. He cut between Rock and the approaching robot, which drew a plastic ray gun from what looked like a cell-phone holster around its waist. It pointed the gun at the coach and fired a ray of tiny sparks into his midsection.
"How much does that hurt?" Rock said.
"Just a little," the coach said. "It just feels like a very mild shock."
The spaceship turned toward the black coach after he stood from his desk and walked into a small snack room that connected the assistants' office with  the head coach's. The robot joined the ship and rolled toward the coach, who stood between two small tables, a handful of chairs, and two rows of vending machines.
A coach seated at his desk laughed. "I'll tell you what, Rock, you really don't want them to team up on you."

Practice

Rock and another coach tried to direct a football practice, but chaos began to take control as the drills grew more detailed. The final straw came with a particularly complex play that had everyone running in seemingly endless circles around the large rug in Rock's back bedroom.
It wasn't long before he began to question whether or not this mess was a football practice at all. Nothing about it made much sense.
He was prone on the rug and clearly unbalanced. His right hand seemed injured. At any rate, he knew it hurt like hell.

Cold Dr. Pepper

They were in a shady spot on the west side of the backstretch of Oaklawn Park's racetrack, on a hill perhaps twenty feet off the track. Rock had never noticed it before. Greta, a 25-year-old retired jockey Rock had somewhat adored for years, sat beside two fifty-year-old female riders and a small, frail, deeply wrinkled old man. They each held bottles of soft drinks, beaded with water, apparently drawn from a nearby wooden trough filled with ice and dozens of bottles of Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper.
As Rock walked toward them, Greta glanced his way, but her expression displayed nothing, a reaction that in no way surprised him.
"Hi y'all," Rock said. "Greta, is there any chance I could take one of those Cokes?"
"They're for the workers," she said.
It was exactly the response Rock expected, but after a pause of a few seconds, Greta stood and walked toward the drinks. As she reached into the slush, she said, "What do you want?"
"Oh, thanks. How 'bout a Dr. Pepper."
Greta handed a bottle to the man, who opened it with an old, rusty church-key opener. Rock took it from him and thought it tasted better than anything he had ever drunk.
"Wow," he said. "I didn't realize how thirsty I was."
As he drank, Rock watched Greta mount her horse and ride away.