LIMTUCKY: Valero

The Valero is full of crust. Old men in rancher jackets and green dungarees, wanting to smoke. No smoking inside the gas station. The gas station smells like cigarettes.

Truman says, "Oh here's a sight. Hammerin Hank. Where's yer hammer, Hank?"

"If it were up your ass, you'd know."

"Never heard that before."

-- Truman had a beard like a Quaker, red and some grey now, completely off-putting with no mustache to go with it.

"Hank, you know what my problem is with you? You think yer better than me. Admit it, you think yer better than me."

"I don't think I'm better'n you," Hank says. "My thoughts on me, what I am, wouldn't come into play were I to consider my dislike of you."

-- The old timers taking note now.

"You think yer smart?"

"This minute, talking with you, no, I don't think I'm smart."

-- Truman is looking around at a lot of old timers. Grasping for an out line, but cleverness was never his thing.

-- Hank turns around to leave. He doesn't hear the man again until he's in the parking lot.

 "Hank."

-- Now Truman is with him, gently, ever so gently, invading his space, his hand on Hank's arm.

"I could use an extra guy over at the pit, at least until the snow, and after, maybe."

"You keeping the pit open through the winter?"

"If there's business."

"Is there?"

"Probably not."

-- Hank thought about the man walking the cat. He considered telling Truman that he didn't have any other prospects. He thought how brave it would be to just admit it, especially to this guy. But living in truth had a limit. That limit was Truman. Some people weren't safe with honesty.

 "Too be honest, Truman, I got this other thing."

HOTEL: Trade Winds

Been awhile, Rockland. A long while, October Rockland. Halloween? Maybe I'll go out as the ghost of my early twenties.

LIMTUCKY: Double Wide

A fat man walking his cat on a leash.

"Look for yourself."

-- Hank looks through the screen.

Hank looks back at Mert, "Maybe he's walking through his truth."

-- Mert didn't follow. "Walking through truth?" 

He imagined man and cat walking through a wall of snot - ectoplasm was truth.

-- Mert had many cousins. Hank was one his own age. They could have been brothers, (there were those rumors about daddies). They were sometimes a team: Mert (thought he) drew bitches, Hank (thought he) was a tough guy, (Ironically they shared a distaste of former San Francisco 49rs free safety Merton Hanks; it wasn't that they disliked the 49rs per se, and neither thought himself a racist, but both regarded long necked black folk as mystical and uncanny. This is no non sequitur, it is a matter of their bond).

They had always been friends, now they were roomies as well, ever since Juanita sent Hank packing to the other side of the park, to Mert's double wide, (bequeathed to him by one of his alleged Pa's).

"When you say, walking with his truth, what does that mean?"

"Well, (and here, Hank thought over his answer), it just means being awake. Being awake to what you are in some fashion; to what you are in some way that allows you to do things such as leash your cat. There's a fine line between a free man and a slaving fucking poseur. You read me?"

Powdered vanilla creamer for the coffee. Blueberry bismarks. Sulfurous water. Chew. Menthol cigarettes.

"I think if the cat walker comes back by I'll go down and introduce myself."

"You do that," Hank says to him, "But I got to go."

"You working?"

"No. I'm looking. Maybe go to Home Depot, see what's what."

"If you worked at the Home Depot, what aisle would you choose?"

"The aisle would be mine alone?"

"You its master."

"Good question. I'd say tools. I wouldn't want some girl to get her dad the wrong lithium ion batteries. And I'd up-sell the Black and Deckers just for laughs."

"What's the worst aisle?"

"Lumber. All those warped boards."

"That's quite a metaphor, Hank."

"Yeah it is. I'm a regular Juice Newton."

"Hank?"

"Yuh?"

"I don't know if you're being sarcastic about Juice Newton."

"Neither do I. Perhaps living in my truth means admitting I don't know what I mean; maybe I feel nostalgic for the target of the joke I'm making even as I make it, and maybe, after saying the joke, I regret it, despite I don't know the target -- because, if it is meaningless, to speak lightly of another person's work, a stranger, well then, maybe we all are just a bunch of soulless turds."

"Hank."

"Yes?"

"You serious about getting this job?"

-- Hank lights another cig.

"Last night I was thinking about that kid got drunk and fell off the roof of the church."

"This again?"

"But Mert, who hasn't been drunk on the roof of the church?"

"I was last February."

"But this kid died. Why? A good kid! The reason can't be, no reason. No reason? God just folding his arms like a woman, shrugs, and says, No reason."

Booze.

Yes.

Yes.

Fine.

I'll see you later.

After Hank leaves, Mert calls over to Hank's trailer, and tells Hank's wife, Juanita, he can't see her today.

NOTES: On Football Stats and Narrative

Sports are fun. Sometimes they even fill up neat narratives as smoothly as if they were booked by wrestling promoters. But often times not. In these times, when say, your team is rostered with dirt bags, or (worse), chokers, one needs find a way to explain away the trolls. It's all a fascinating bit of cognitive dissonance. The question is: why do people need an excuse for supporting dirt bags. Throwing a football is beauty, just as Van Gogh's sunflowers and stars are; that one is art doesn't disqualify the shallower beauty as transcendent. Beauty is a universal country, all of us blind patriots.

When I was a boy my football heroes were just that, heroes. It was biblical, and Emmitt Smith was Jesus -- I can tell you I had the whole gimmick worked out as to why Emmitt Smith was better than Barry Sanders at running the football. I was no football atheist. I was a kid true believer. I admired this athlete. I attributed to this athlete qualities such as work ethic, perseverance, and heart; these attributes became far more important than the attributes that may have been lacking in him, and greater in others, in this case: elite athleticism. Cognitive dissonance, like me working the blue collar angle with Emmitt, is easy and uncomplicated, so long as the object of your affection does not fail the narrative you construct; in the case of Emmitt Smith, he never failed me other than to get old; the worst personality defect ever attributed to Emmitt Smith was that he had the mind of a businessman -- hardly transcendent, but not exactly Michael Jackson in a house full of kids. When fandom gets icky as in the Michael Jackson case, or when Jim Brown throws a woman out a window, or Lance Armstrong dopes, or the New England Patriots get into Spygate -- here is where the conspiracy theories come out, the "everyone was doing it",  or "people were out to get them", stories -- (perhaps you have a few friends who run this gimmick in defending their favored politician?) -- it is icky here because the person is now desperately defending indefensible behavior, or failure, and for what? It isn't necessary to defend joy you have already felt, so what is it you are defending? The answer is injured tribalism. Had Emmitt Smith pissed positive for steroids, it would have done a number to my blue collar romanticism over his work ethic, and my identification as a fan of everything Dallas Cowboys. If you made Barack Obama your savior, and it turns out he is merely mortal, you might have a time reconciling it, or you could just say: "Election night in that field was a great night.".

Tom Brady is clutch, except he is and he isn't, which is to say, he is a an elite quarterback at not making mistakes, just not as magical as he seemed ten years ago, when he won three super bowls, and his first eleven playoff games -- Brady is like a poker player that went on a ridiculous run of cards, and given how hot the cards were running, he did everything right; and since then, however those cards are running, he manages those cards beautifully, just not magically. But grown men will argue with me that he is magical, a gridiron Gandalf, full of wonders. Because the cognitive dissonance of fandom tells these fans that the three championships Tom Brady won by three points were won via "the Patriot Way", whereas when the super bowl he lost by four points comes up, they remember every single call that didn't go their way.  Eli Manning's transcendance was fluky and against the rules. 
I won't disagree with Pats fans about the helmet catch, just that it is no more unfair or fluky than the tuck rule. The truth of Tom Brady is that he is great, and also his career, in regards to the magic of how it started, regressed to the median -- it was a market correction, even as the player himself became better than the player he was when he won his titles.

Ahh the wonders of sabermetrics. Sabermetrics are the new stats. Stats devised by MIT eggheads and the like to more accurately, more scientifically, assess, and predict excellence in sports. Nouveau stat lines for the degenerate gambler and sports atheist, wherein the athletic achievement is no longer sappy narrative, but some kind of obsessive modern autistic math game. Simplest explanation: better stats for calculating individual greatness inside a team sport; take all the grit, and clutch, and heart away; who performs the best in the theoretical vacuum introduced by these shiny better stats? This is the world all the Madden kids, (like me), have grown up into with our childish sports fantasies.

PICS: Art Bell's Dog

FLASH: Cold Open

Right is right. All day he'd been thinking this until the words had lost meaning but gained power, become a chant, grown a melody. Right is right. Right is right. Right is right, he thought as he stopped in the middle of the dirt road and tried to remember how he had been wronged.