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Tim Sandlin: Social Blunders

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Tim Sandlin Social Blunders

Social Blunders: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Sam Callahan's mother told him she was raped by four football players when she was 14. One of them is his father, but which? She lied; actually, she paid them for sex. Anyway, Sam contacts each of the men and causes endless trouble. Soon, an affair with the wife of one man, an attraction to the daughter of another, and an attempted suicide have Sam running for his life. Wonderful characters spout outrageous dialog and perform even more outrageous acts. Sandlin's wild, wonderful, and wickedly funny romps conclude the trilogy that began with Skipped Parts (Ivy Bks., 1989) and continued in Sorrow Floats (LJ 8/92). Social Blunders can be read independently of the previous volumes. The tale is a little naughty, a little sentimental, and completely entertaining. Highly recommended.

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Secretly, I was pleased Maurey had seen the parallel, although I’d always related to the hunchback more from the tragic outsider aspect than as a savior of Gypsy girls.

“Do you and your mother often discuss my psychic makeup?”

“Everyone discusses your psychic makeup—Mom, Grandma Lydia, Gus. Hank Elkrunner says you’re an egomaniac with delusions of inferiority.”

“I suppose Hank figured that out by throwing chicken bones.”

Shannon shrugged the way she did when I was being too unreasonable to argue with and went back to her chrome. It was evening in October, the silver light hour when thousands of male Southerners all across the Carolinas stand back and toss lit kitchen matches at lighter fluid–soaked mounds of charcoal.

Shannon said, “You’ll be mooning over a new woman within a week. Why not save me some teenage anxiety and find a nice one this time? Hand me that T-shirt.”

“Isn’t this my T-shirt?” It was lime colored with Greensboro Hornets in white over a yellow cartoon hornet swinging crossed baseball bats. “Wanda was nice.”

Shannon stopped rubbing the headlights long enough to stare me down—one of those how-dare-you-lie-to-me stares women inherently pass on to one another. Shannon looks so much like Maurey, it’s almost enough to make you believe in virgin birth. Where were my genes in this person who called me Daddy? Both my women had thick, dark brown hair, except Shannon cut hers short, collar length, while Maurey’s hair hung down her back. Long neck, small hands, cheekbones of a Victoria’s Secret nightie model, teeth that had never cost me a dime over checkups and cleaning—the only difference was Shannon had brown eyes while Maurey’s were sky blue. And Maurey had a scar on her chin from a beating she once took at the hands of a man.

I said, “Okay, she wasn’t so nice, but she had potential. Remember her crab salad.”

“You don’t marry a woman over crab salad. Wanda was a dysfunctional stepmother, a stereotype of the Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel ilk.”

Ilk? “My God, who have you been talking to? Are you dating a psych major?”

Shannon reddened along the neck behind her ears. Fatherly intuition strikes again. The only question was whether the blush came from sex fantasized or sex completed. Shannon rubbed my T-shirt across the windshield with all her might. When she spoke, her voice sounded like she was hitting someone.

“You can’t save every fucked-up woman you stumble over.”

“I’d rather you not talk that way when I’m close by.”

She turned the hose dangerously close to my tennis shoes. “You made fun of me when I said dysfunctional.”

“Let’s try neurotic.”

“Okay. You find these neurotic women, God knows where, and you think that if you accept them as they are, out of sheer gratitude, they’ll change.”

Not a bad analysis for a nineteen-year-old. Of course, I couldn’t admit that; never let a daughter know she might be right. “Why is it children always oversimplify their parents?”

Shannon smiled at me. “I doubt if it’s possible to oversimplify you, Daddy. That’s why I love you.”

Tears leapt to my eyes. Wanda’s leaving had turned me into an emotional sap, to the point where I’d cried the day before when I heard the neighbor kids singing “Happy Birthday to You.” Because the picture on the front of the jar reminded me of a young Shannon, I’d stuffed a hundred-dollar check into the muscular dystrophy display at Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House.

Shannon either ignored or didn’t notice my poignant moment. She stood back to admire her shiny, clean Mustang. It was ten years old, creamy white with a black interior and a Lick Jesse Helms in ’84 bumper sticker. I’d given it to her for high school graduation.

“One thing for certain,” Shannon said, still looking at her car instead of me. “That woman wasn’t worth a heart attack. Why not get drunk and chase women the way you did before?”

“Because I married this one. The grief process is different when a marriage breaks up.”

Her eyes finally came to mine. “Heck, Daddy, you’re only grieving because you think that’s what Kurt Vonnegut would do in the situation.”

“Don’t lecture your father on grief. I was miserable before you were even born.”

Shannon stuck the hose in my pocket.

***

I flee to my Exercycle 6000 and ride fifty-five miles at high tension. Depression must be avoided, no matter what the cost. Depression is lying on the Edwardian couch for six months, too tired to unlace your shoes. Depression is awakening each morning feeling as if someone near and dear and closely related died the night before. Bad news. Don’t tempt depression. Far better to pump a stationary bicycle for six hours, full speed, dripping sweat into your eyes and hurling curses at women not present.

Starting with Wanda. Wanda of the black braids, tiny tits, and ferocious tongue; Wanda who said my intelligence and ability to articulate caused her crotch to tingle with slurpy anticipation; Wanda who said “I do”; the very same Wanda who stole my Datsun 240Z and ran off with the pool boy—the pool boy for Chrissake. No matter how long or how hard I pump the Exercycle 6000, I can’t get around it. She left me, the author of The Shortstop Kid and Jump Shot to Glory, for a boy with Born to Loose tattooed across his left shoulder blade.

My housekeeper, Gus, has no pity. “Wanda was a tramp. You just falling apart ’cause you think that’s what a man does when his wife leave.”

“But she left with a boy who can’t read.”

“So what he can’t read.” Gus is six feet two inches tall and black as a Milk Dud. When I piss her off, which is often, she leans back with her hands planted on both hips and glares down her nose at me. “She don’t want his brain any more than she want yours. What she wants is his Peter.”

I stop pedaling. “Is that what she wanted from me?”

“You, she want money, fool.”

***

I ride with a fury—ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. Sadistically, I screw the knob that increases the tension in my pedals until my quadriceps and calves scream in pain. When Shannon said it’s not worth a heart attack, she wasn’t speaking metaphorically. My chest pounds like a train. I can hear each gush of blood spurting through my temples. Sweat trickles from the ear where Wanda’s tongue once licked. The saddle digs into my butt, raising blisters on the cheeks where Wanda’s fingernails used to rake.

After five or six hours of riding toward a wall, the brain forgets there was ever a before the bike or may ever be an after the bike. I enter a zone without time, pain, or exhaustion. Some call it coma. If the deal works right, I forget the tongue and fingernails for a moment and reach a point of being so thoroughly wrung out that I sleep.

***

Before I discovered frenetic exercise, I only knew two other methods of avoiding depression. The first—getting drunk and staying drunk. That’s not my style, and besides, when alcohol fails it fails big time. The second—sleeping with someone else as soon as is humanly possible. That is my style.

Here’s my past pattern: I’d say to myself, next time out, tonight, I’ll choose an impossible woman, an obvious trollop with whom I could never connect in any way outside the crotch. An airhead or a drunk or a married woman, anyone just so she’s impossible. And I’ll be safe.

Only the sex turns out not so empty and I wind up trying to save a lost woman who’d rather not be saved. Starting with the beautiful and wonderful Maurey Pierce at the age of thirteen, I had systematically, purposefully, made certain each woman was worse than the one before, in hopes of protecting myself in the clinches, and finally, upon reaching what I took as the rock bottom of women who could cause me pain, I married Wanda.

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