I cannot hold Tony Romo’s injury against you. Injuries are part of the game, and no one can predict when they might occur. This would be difficult for me to accept if I were in your position, as I prefer facts and things that I can rely on. However, you do not seem to be bothered by the capriciousness of injuries.
I can hold against you, however, the fact that, as a backup quarterback, Brad Johnson appears to be far short of acceptable. This is something you should have known and accounted for in building a roster, as it is at least a reasonable possibility that the backup quarterback will have to play occasionally. With Tony Romo injured, it’s not possibility—it’s reality.
Finally, I must lay some of the blame at the feet of your defense. I have seen grandmothers who hit harder than some of your players. (This is not actually true. I have never seen a grandmother hit, and I could not, without some physical experimentation, say for certain that any grandmother could hit harder than your players could. This is a literary device called hyperbole.)
I thank you in advance for your kind attention to these pressing matters.
After filing away the letter to Jerry Jones—the thirty-eighth one I have written to him—I remember that I have more writing yet to do. I am corresponding with more people than I ever have before, and it exhausts me.
I log on to Montana Personal Connect and write a note to Joy.
Joy:
Yes, I agree that we should talk about meeting. You should know, however, that I do not like Garth Brooks. I hope this doesn’t make you reconsider meeting me.
I think it is better that I wait a while before telling Joy about the forty-nine letters of complaint that I sent to Garth Brooks.
My mind cleared of the unpleasantness of the Dallas Cowboys and the anxiety of having to respond to Joy, I am free to turn my full attention to The Big Project. I work away at drilling and sawing and connecting and screwdrivering (which isn’t really a word), and I think only a little about how the anxiety of responding to Joy is gone but that the anxiety of actually perhaps meeting her is very much here.
The work goes quickly; I did well for myself by sketching out some plans beforehand. It helps that I am very good with tools. I do not say that to be boastful. It is a fact, and I prefer facts. When I was at Billings West High School twenty-one years ago, the only class I liked was wood shop. There was no high school social strata there. The only question anyone had was whether you could do the work, and I could. Mr. Withers even made me the shop assistant my senior year. He told my parents when I graduated that I was the best student he had ever had. My father was so proud he was beaming. I still get notes from Mr. Withers on occasion. I think he might be the only person who ever noticed that I was at Billings West High School at all, although I would have to take a poll of everyone who was there at the time to know for sure, and I just don’t have time for that right now.
I might have liked to have been a shop teacher, but I do not think I could have put up with the rowdy kids and the parents and the paperwork and the demands of the principals. I am sure I could not. I don’t think there is enough fluoxetine in the world or enough wisdom in Dr. Buckley to get me through that.
The tool work done, I roll The Big Project up the stairs, out the back door, and into the garage. It’s time to paint—The Big Project, not the garage. The garage will come tomorrow.
Tonight’s episode of Dragnet, the twenty-fifth and penultimate (I love the word “penultimate”) of the fourth and final season, is called “Burglary: Baseball,” and it is one of my favorites.
G. D. Spradlin, an actor who appeared in three episodes of Dragnet, plays a man named Arthur Leo Tyson, and he cracks safes for sport. He’s an ex-convict who is on parole, and it turns out that he misses being in prison. This is a condition called “institutionalization,” and it sounds awful to me. And yet, Arthur Leo Tyson has much to look forward to when he gets back in “the pen.” The inmate baseball team at San Quentin expects to have a good season, and he wants to be a part of it. This amuses Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon, who take a liking to Arthur Leo Tyson even though he is an unrepentant criminal. It’s nice to think that police officers can be a little human.
G. D. Spradlin is one of the more recognizable actors on Dragnet, and he went on to be a character actor in many shows and movies over the years. He has a very distinctive face: It’s kind of round, and he has crinkled eyes and a perpetually pursed mouth—the kind of mouth that “looks like a chicken’s asshole,” as my Grandpa Sid used to say. He has a raspy Southern accent, the kind that Grandpa Sid had, too. If you ever saw the movie One on One, starring Robby Benson as a basketball star, then you know who G. D. Spradlin is. He played the coach, and his mouth looked like a chicken’s asshole for most of that film.
I would have liked to write to G. D. Spradlin about his experiences on Dragnet, but he was well known enough that I never found out his address. I looked him up on the Internet a couple of years ago, and he seemed to still be alive, although he hasn’t worked in a long time. He would be old now—eighty-eight, according to the Internet.
That’s how old Grandpa Sid would be, too, if he were still alive.
Time flummoxes me.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 20
I’m awake at 7:38 a.m., the 223rd time out of 294 days this year (because it’s a leap year). While I seem to be tacking back to normal, if in fact normal can be defined, I don’t feel normal at all. I don’t want to leave my bed. Michael Stipe’s headache gray is settling over me, the residue of my late-to-bed-early-to-rise act yesterday.
I drift away.
I’m not a part of the scene I’m witnessing. Joy, my online paramour (I love the word “paramour”) from Broadview, is standing in a parking lot that is filled not with cars and pickups and SUVs but with a throng of people who stand around her.
Joy is holding a huge controller in her hands, something that looks like a TV remote, only much larger. It has buttons and a joystick. She holds it over her head, and the crowd behind her cheers. The gathered people then start chanting: “Show it! Show it! Show it! Show it!”
Joy turns away from the crowd, lowers the giant remote control, and starts punching buttons. Above her and the crowd, pressed flat against the side of a building, a giant plasma TV screen flickers awake. And there I am, ten times as big as life, sitting at my computer desk. I am naked. Worse than that, if anything could be worse than that, I am cooing as I type on my computer: “Oh, Joy. You are my little chickadee. You are my sweetie.”
In unison, the crowd belts out a thunderous laugh, and Joy turns around, a smile drawn across her face, her dimples carving holes in her cheeks, her eyes alight.
The crowd turns around, too, and they’re all pointing and laughing.
I look down and I am no longer on the plasma screen but in the parking lot, naked.
I look up in horror, and Donna Middleton is in the middle of the front row of hecklers, laughing at me.
I’m awake again at 10:26. My data is all fouled up, of course. I’m entering uncharted territory here, and so I improvise. I reach over, grab my notebook and a pen, and record two times: