Sam Lipsyte - The Fun Parts

I do know the world is divided, or even just subdivided, between those who have met their Bucky Schmidt and those who have their Bucky coming. I’ve met my Bucky Schmidt and so I’m never disappointed by the way of things. I don’t want and want. Good money, good times, I’m happy for what I get. You don’t worry so much about it all when you know there is somebody out there who can take everything away like some terrible god.

That day, all of us just stood there to watch a god put shots. I wondered what Bucky Schmidt was thinking in the middle of his spin. I doubt it was snapperholes, or even to accelerate. The word “accelerate” would have slowed him down. The boy was pure blur.

“He’s a strange guy, but holy shit,” said that Badger, Baum. “And he throws longer in practice.”

“He doesn’t throw,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s not throwing. It’s putting. Shot-putting.”

“Sure thing,” said the Badger.

“Have you looked at his toes?” I said.

“Why would I do that?”

“Does he have a banjo?”

“Clarinet. I’ve seen it.”

“Can he talk?”

“Why wouldn’t he talk?”

“He’s a Jackson, right?” I said.

“He’s a Schmidt,” said the Badger. “Is that a Jackson? What’s a Jackson?”

“Ask Schmidt,” I said.

* * *

After the meet, Coach Monroe gathered us next to the field house.

“I want to thank you boys for a great year,” he said. “You really gave it your all.”

“We got killed today,” said Merk.

“You sure as hell did,” came a voice.

A stranger leaned on the field house wall.

“Guys,” said Coach Monroe. “I’d like you to meet Rick Oldcorn. The one and only.”

This Oldcorn was as huge as I’d always imagined, but bald, with muttonchop whiskers and a gut that buried his belt. He wore cop shades, a T-shirt for a titty bar. He looked like a Jackson, or what I figured a Jackson would look like if I ever really saw one. Maybe I never would.

“You guys are shit,” said Oldcorn, “but what can you do with a jackass like Monroe for a coach?”

“Thanks, pal,” said Coach Monroe, and his smile said it all, though I wasn’t exactly sure what it said.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Oldcorn.

“Do you want beer?” said Merk.

“I want all the beer in your town,” said Oldcorn. “And I want teen poot, if that’s available. Let’s ride.”

We piled into Coach Monroe’s pickup. Oldcorn followed on his bike. Soon we sat in Merk’s uncle’s basement drinking beer and sword fighting with cue sticks. It was fun for a while. Fun was important.

“You guys want a bump?” said Oldcorn, pulling out a small packet.

“Do your arm!” said Fred Powler.

Oldcorn grinned, popped his shoulder out of its socket, popped it back.

Then Merk’s uncle came down with more beer.

“We can do whatever we want,” he announced, “as long as we stay in the basement.”

Soon he was crooning into a spatula.

Fred Powler lay down on the pool table. “Lost ambition,” he said. “For cars.”

Slivers of puke clung to his lip.

Merk carried his uncle up to bed. Coach Monroe slumped in the corner. Oldcorn and I sat at the bar with our beers. It felt like a place I would be for a long time to come.

“Why did you walk off the field in the trials for Montreal?” I said.

“I met this chick,” he said.

“Oh.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. It all got damn depressing. Going from town to town just to throw a metal ball around. Seemed silly.”

“Put,” I said. “Not throw.”

“Jesus, kid,” said Oldcorn. “Don’t be one of those guys.”

“But you were the best in the world,” I said.

“Damn straight I was,” said Oldcorn. “So you can imagine the scope of my depression.”

“Up yours,” said a voice behind us. “Up yours, Oldcorn.”

Coach Monroe steadied himself on a beer lamp, rose.

“Hey, good buddy,” said Oldcorn. “Welcome back.”

“Up yours, you, buddy,” said Coach Monroe. His eyes had wet, pulsing rims.

“Oldcock,” said Coach Monroe.

“Watch it, now,” said Oldcorn.

“Oldfuck.”

It was all pretty quick. Coach Monroe had a beer bottle he was maybe thinking of cracking over Oldcorn’s head. Next thing he was on his knees, pawing for his nose through the blood on his face.

Oldcorn rubbed his fist.

“Tell that other kid thanks for the beer.”

I heard his bike start up on the gravel drive.

* * *

I do not know if Oldcorn found any teen poot that night. It might not have been so available. We heard nothing about him and did not speak of him again.

Coach Monroe wore gauze on his nose for the rest of the year. He went on to marry Mindy Richter’s mother.

Merk went off to the war. I haven’t talked to him since graduation, when we all walked down the stadium steps in our nylon robes and got certificates for being alive and living in New Jersey — all of us except Fred Powler, who didn’t quite qualify, but who waved to us from the grass.

I wish there was some other story that could make you feel better about Fred Powler, but he clubbed his father with a chair leg and had to go to some kind of home. Chief Powler claimed it was an accident, which I’m sure it was.

Everything in this life, with the exception of snowrocks, is an accident.

I live in the city now. There are so many kinds of people here, and sometimes they look at me funny, like I’ve just come down from a shack on a mountain. But I’ve got a studio apartment. There’s just enough room for some good spins on the hardwood. I’ll spend Sunday morning being Bucky Schmidt, or the Oldcorn of Mexico, gun grapefruits into the wall. My last girlfriend used to get pissed when I did this, plus they were her grapefruits, but what the hell, she was over me anyway.

Davis called, told me he was dying.

He said his case was — here was essence of Davis — time sensitive.

“Come visit,” he said. “Bid farewell to the ragged rider.”

“You?” I said. “The cigarette hater? That’s just wrongness.”

“Nonetheless, brother, come.”

“Who was that?” said Ondine, my ex-mother-in-law. I kissed her cream-goldened shoulder, slid out of bed.

“A sick friend. I’ve known him twenty years, more, since college. I might have to leave town for a while.”

“No,” said Ondine. “You’re leaving town for good. The occupation ends today. It’s been calamity for us, for the region. Go to your friend.”

“He’s not really my friend.”

“All the more reason to go to him,” said Ondine. “Jesus would be in Pennsylvania by now.”

* * *

Ypsilanti was easy to leave. I wasn’t from there. I’d just landed there. The Michigan Eviscerations had begun in Manhattan. Martha was a junior at NYU, heiress to a fuel-injection fortune. I was the cheeky barista who kept penciling my phone number on her latte’s heat sleeve. Cheeky and, I should add, quite hairy. Martha finally dialed the smudged figures on the corrugated cuff, cavorted in my belly fur. The woman never exhibited any qualms about our economic divide. After all, she’d remind me, I was a Jew. One day I’d just quit mucking around with burlap sacks of Guatemalan Sunrise and start brewing moolah.

“You can’t help it,” she said. “It’s a genetic thing. You weren’t allowed to own land in the Middle Ages.”

I wasn’t allowed to own land in Michigan either. We got married, but her folks bought the Ann Arbor house in her name. Martha enrolled for a master’s degree at the university. She demanded that I concoct a passion she could bankroll, a “doable dream.” What would it be? Poetry journal? Microlabel for the new jam rock? Nanobatch raki boutique? I mulled over these and other notions but mostly focused on my favored pursuit: grilling premium meats. I grilled grass-fed beef, saddles of rabbit, bison, organic elk. My mulled projects moldered. I’d always pictured myself the genius in the journal, on the label, not running the damn things. Moreover, wasn’t there bookkeeping involved, basic math? No matter what Martha believed about my inherited numerical wizardry honed on the twisty streets of Antwerp, or maybe Münster, I could barely count.