Matt Posner's Blog: You've Been Schooled

Hi, this is Matt, and I'm taking a break from being a harried classroom teacher to challenge fellow indie author Andy Peloquin to a duel to the death! We aren't going to fight ourselves, of course; he's younger and has a lot more hair. Our characters will fight instead.

In the brown corner, standing at 5' 7", we have Simon Magus, age 17, star senior of School of the Ages, America's greatest magic school! (This is Simon as he is entering School of the Ages V: The Wonderful Carol, which I am now busily writing.)

Tale of the Tape:
• Wields an antique British light cavalry saber previously used by his great-grandfather in the Sepoy Mutiny
• Shoots with a bow hand-crafted for him by Arjuna, the great archer from the great Hindu epic "the Mahabharata"
• Combat-oriented magician with a diverse repertoire of offensive and defensive spells
• Can cast a concealment spell that makes him sort of invisible, although this is less effective against elite warriors (like the Hunter) if they are trying to spot him.
• Can cause intense pain, knock his opponent back or down with magic, disarm his opponent, and improvise spells on the fly based on emerging combat situations
• His spell-casting is unlimited, and he can work magic as much as the situation requires until he gets too distracted, tired, or wounded
• Physically, except for a slight resistance to physical blows and pain that is basically genetic, he is a normal person.

In the black corner, weighing in at 180 pounds, standing a cool 6 feet tall, the Hunter of Voramis!
Tale of the Tape:
• Superhuman reflexes, strength, speed--think Captain America, but stronger
• Thousands of years of weapons training
• Body has accelerated healing factor--can survive a sword to the heart (can be killed by drowning, iron weapons, beheading, and suffocation)
• Cannot be killed by anything but iron
• Accursed dagger that heals him when he kills
• No magical abilities whatsoever
• No hesitation to kill if he perceives opponent as a threat/obstacle to his desires--classic anti-hero

Two enter the ring, only one can leave alive!

How would Simon kill the Hunter? Simon has to stay concealed and get out of the Hunter's line of sight (behind him, or behind an object). He will then cast his disarming spell at the Hunter's hand and knock him back from the weapon. Using his combat magic, he will try to get hold of Soulhunger to use it against the Hunter. Because the Hunter is vastly physically superior and has an elite soldier's ability to see through the concealment spell, Simon can't use his sword or bow and will probably have to keep knocking the Hunter down or knocking him back. He can't kill the Hunter except with an iron weapon, but he can cause enough pain and injury with his magic to stun or briefly disable the Hunter so that he can use Soulhunger to kill him.

To kill Simon: The Hunter would try to overwhelm Simon with his inhuman speed, strength, and skill. All he has to do is pierce her skin with Soulhunger, and the dagger will consume her soul. Not even someone with considerable magical abilities can survive Soulhunger's bite--it was created to kill demons.
Who would win?

Simon uses Advanced Concealment and puts up a defensive cylinder. He doesn't bother with the weapons but instead concentrates on getting out of the Hunter's line of sight so that the Hunter's natural fighting skill and experience won't give him the will to break the spell. The Hunter, however, is so fast that he is nearly upon Simon before he can do this. The defensive cylinder gives him enough warning to get out of the way of the dagger and run. He uses his Up Against the Wall spell to throw the Hunter face-first into the corner of the ring. The Hunter is completely uninjured and with catlike grace turns and approaches his position with the blade slashing in a wide arc. Simon feels it whistle past his cheek even though he is backing away. He leaps to get some distance, falls and rolls across the mat and quickly visualizes the Hunter's hand, putting a scorpion sting spell through it. Startled, the Hunter drops the dagger, but catches it again immediately. "A cowardly sneak, eh?" he declares. "I'll find you, and your soul will be my catch of the day."

Winner: It's anyone's fight, folks. Can Simon get enough of a breather to disarm the Hunter and use his dagger against him? Or will the Hunter's keen senses enable him to see through the concealment spell and deal a death-blow?

Want to find out more about the legendary assassin called The Hunter of Voramis to the death? Click here to start reading Andy Peloquin's series The Last Bucelarii.

Blade of the Destroyer

Here's another sneak peak at my upcoming pro wrestling novel, Squared Circle Blues. This scene presents the opening moments of a typical card at Maryland Championship Wrestling.


Promoter Matt Gash went into the locker room and asked his lieutenant, Peter Gutierrez, if Billy Bonfire was sober for his match later.

“Yeah, he smells like weed but he seems pretty clear-headed. Hey, Gash, Wes ain’t got a ref shirt.”

“Put him in yours.”

“Mine’s big on him.”

“Tell him to rip off the sleeves and tear out the sides, so it looks like some kind of muscle outfit. Shit, I have to think of everything?”

As usual, everyone was in place and ready to go by ten minutes after starting time, so finally Gash sent out the ring announcer, Angel, a skinny old man with a big voice and a big blue vein in his nose.

“Welcome to Baltimore’s most famous professional wrestling venue, bringing you the highest grade of professional wrestling action since 1951. My name is Leonard “Angel” Rosenblatt, and I’ll be your ring announcer for this evening. Please stand for the singing of the National Anthem.”

People stood up. They munched popcorn as “The Star Spangled Banner” played on the tinny PA system. The midgets came to ringside largely unnoticed.

“You may be seated. And now, welcome, welcome, weeeeeelllllllcommmme to Maryland Proooooooo Wressssssstling! Our first contest this evening is set for one fall with a fifteen minute time limit.” The midgets climbed the steps and entered the ring, lifting their stubby legs above the bottom rope.

“Introducing first, from Massapequa, Long Island, New York, weighing in at ninety-seven pounds, here is Little Kevin!”

Little Kevin rushed to the center of the ring, ran his hands through his dyed-blonde buzzcut, and did the “speak with his hands” karate strike against an imaginary opponent, then raised his hand in anticipation of victory. A few fans cheered a little. Little Kevin fell back to the corner.

“And his opponent, from Seattle, Washington, weighing in at seventy-nine pounds, here is Knee High Frye!”

Frye stepped just slightly out of the corner and raised a fist. He was booed. Frye had never won a match in Maryland. He had short legs and a big ass and didn’t look as athletic as Little Kevin. He scowled.

“Your special referee for tonight, from New Jersey, here is Maryland Pro Wrestling’s up-and-coming star, Wes Chico!”

Seated a few rows back from ringside, Peter Gutierrez watched his son enter wearing the shredded ref shirt, and made a small comment in his spiral notebook to remind Angel of the proper name of the promotion.

The midgets had a shtick they did every night, including chasing each other around the ring, running between the referee’s legs, and biting him on the ass. They then settled into rest holds interrupted by more of the same nonsense, and then Little Kevin did a cartwheel past a charging Frye, who crashed into Wes, bounced off, got up slowly, and turned just in time to be hit with the “speak with his hands” maneuver. Little Kevin crashed down on top of his chest and weakly grabbed one leg. One-two-three.

Peter wrote in his notebook that the act was stale and that they should freshen it up if they were ever again to have a run in Maryland.

Sneak Preview of Squared Circle Blues
by Matt Posner
coming September 2015 (I hope)


Becky had to pound on the door of Billy’s room for a long time before he opened it. He leaned against the wall just inside the door as she came in. He was wearing his boxers and not much else. His hair was tousled. His chest was covered with broken blood vessels. He stank. Becky pushed him into the shower, turned on the water, and left him to bathe. She opened his luggage and pulled out clean underwear, clean socks, jeans and a t-shirt. She opened the hotel window the crack it would open, lit one of his cigarettes, smoked out the window. Billy came out naked and dressed in the clothes she had laid out for him.

“Let’s go to the diner,” she said when he was dressed. “You’re paying.”

Hestia’s Olympic Diner was a block from the hotel. After the shower, Billy was able to walk there. He staggered a little. He hadn’t shaken off the previous night’s hurts. Billy was a well-trained, skilled wrestler who could take a beating, but Fighting Eagle was both clumsy and stiff.

While they were having their eggs, toast, and coffee, Dora Gutierrez arrived and slid in next to Becky. Her heavy features and broad shoulders belied her tall, thin frame. She wore a linen blouse and dark skirt and a hair ribbon whose girliness didn’t match her mannish face.

“I got to get me my own car,” Billy said.

“You’d just wreck it,” said Dora. “The usual,” she called to a waitress. Dora’s voice was a low croak. She didn’t smoke anymore, but had acquired a permanent huskiness from her smoking days.

“I ain’t never wrecked a car,” said Billy.

“Why don’t you start paying me for gas money?” Becky suggested.
“Since I got to drive you everywhere. Instead of all this bullshit about saving for a car you ain’t safe to drive.”

The waitress brought Dora oatmeal with raisins.

“You should eat more,” said Becky.

“Aah, what’s it matter?” said Dora.

“You’re getting skinny.”

“I give a fuck?” asked Dora.

“You get any skinnier, your tits’ll be hanging off your back.”

“Aah.” Dora took a tiny bite of oatmeal. “I got no appetite.”
She turned her attention to Billy. “Gash ain’t gonna say it, so I will. If you’re getting hurt as bad as last night, just get out of the ring. Roll on the floor, get counted out. Morgenheim’s too stupid to put you back in the ring if you don’t help.”

“I can take it,” Billy said. “Got to have a good match for the crowd, right?”

“Got to make your next shot,” Dora countered. “If you can’t get out of bed the next day, or your ass is in the hospital, then what?"

In Level Three’s Dream, this passage appears in the U.S. edition, but not in the India edition. My editor (where editor = person who deletes a lot) removed it by stating that it is gibberish. I understand the statement, but actually, it’s not gibberish, but is a carefully crafted text. Mermelstein and Lorena have just met H.D., a giant egg sitting on a wall, and asked him his name. He replies:

“H.D. may stand for Humpty Dumpty,” he said, “but there are many additional names. Clearly I am not Hilda Doolittle. But in Looking-Glass Land, I am called Ytpmud Ytpmuh; in Spanish, Humpito Dumpito; in French, le Umpe-Dump; in Latin, Umpetis Dumpetuum, in the dative. And in Hawaiian I am called Uameapea Duapemialoa, and in Afrikaans, Dumpaas Humpaas; the Japanese call me Houmdoumichi-chan; and in the Bronx Homie-Dope; but the Russians dub me simply Fat Vanya. The Elves named me Ilyanto, or on formal occasion Antoparlima; in Georgia I am Humptiydumptiyvilli; in Arabic, al-Maji-Waji, after my son. Shakespeare called me ‘that pressed moon, that upon a wall doth sit sequestred, and doth issue such girth of prattle as may match its girth withal.’ Never grasped that one. To the Poles, I am Humpiszcz Dumpiszcz; to the Czechs Jan Hump; to the Germans, das Ei-das-auf-der-Wand-trägt-eienen-Gurt-und-tag-und-Nacht-spricht-sitz; and the Chinese do not name me. In Airstrip One I shall be called Doubleplusegg. In Italy I am Il Huevatore; and there are those who call me Tim. Aye, why did H.D. cross the road? To get away from a chef.”
“What happened to your son?” asked Lorena.
“He hatched into a cockatrice,” said H.D.

Looks like gibberish? Actually, it’s a lot of rather complicated humor. Perhaps it should be excised, as its inclusion is not really necessary, and another way could be found to meet my goal for the passage. However… Well, let me explain.

“H.D. may stand for Humpty Dumpty,” he said, “but there are many additional names. Clearly I am not Hilda Doolittle.

The poet Hilda Doolitle published her work using her initials, H.D.

But in Looking-Glass Land, I am called Ytpmud Ytpmuh;

Actually, in Looking-Glass Land, it wouldn’t be spelled backwards, but viewed in a mirror reflection, but I couldn’t put that into the text. This makes an OK substitute.

in Spanish, Humpito Dumpito; in French, le Umpe-Dump; in Latin, Umpetis Dumpetuum, in the dative.

These are jokes about the sounds and patterns of the languages. Spanish adds –ito as a diminutive, meaning someone or something is small, cute, or beloved. French might sound like that to a non-speaker. That name is not real Latin, nor is it dative case, which shows that H.D. uses false erudition, pretending to know more than he does.

And in Hawaiian I am called Uameapea Duapemialoa, and in Afrikaans, Dumpaas Humpaas; the Japanese call me Houmdoumichi-chan;

More jokes about the sounds of the languages. Hawaiian language is mostly vowels; Afrikaans has double A’s; and the Japanese use –chan as a diminutive for something beloved or cute.

and in the Bronx Homie-Dope; but the Russians dub me simply Fat Vanya.

A joke about hip-hop language that would have been more current in 2002, when the novel takes place. Homie, obviously, is short for home boy, a term that was still actively in use at the time to mean “good friend” or “person from the neighborhood”, and “dope” means “the truth.” As for Fat Vanya, it is a reference perhaps to the commonality of using Ivan. nickname Vanya, as a hero’s name in Russian folklore.

The Elves named me Ilyanto, or on formal occasion Antoparlima;

I used an online glossary of Tolkien’s Elvish to create these names. Both of them have something to do with eggs, but I forget what exactly.

in Georgia I am Humptiydumptiyvilli; in Arabic, al-Maji-Waji, after my son.

A joke on Georgian names; some Arabic male names are based on sons, where the man is referred to as “father of …”

Shakespeare called me ‘that pressed moon, that upon a wall doth sit sequestred, and doth issue such girth of prattle as may match its girth withal.’ Never grasped that one.

Okay, I can’t write Shakespearean language that well, but I can duck the blame and instead blame it on H.D. He doesn’t understand it because it’s a joke on the average person’s difficulty with Shakespeare. The meaning is, pressed moon, because an egg isn’t spherical and might have been squeezed to get its shape; doth sit sequestered upon a wall, is on a wall away from others; and doth issue such girth of prattle – runs his mouth so much – as may match its girth withal – that his language is always as big as his big belly.

To the Poles, I am Humpiszcz Dumpiszcz; to the Czechs Jan Hump; to the Germans, das Ei-das-auf-der-Wand-trägt-eienen-Gurt-und-tag-und-Nacht-spricht-sitz; and the Chinese do not name me.

Here, respectively, we ahve joke on Polish spelling with sz for the sh sound, and cz for the ch sound; on the Czech preference for the name Jan, which anticipates a Czech character with that name in the next novel in the series; and on the German tendency to make really long words. It’s “the egg that sits on the wall day and night and talks.” The “Chinese do not name” him because I couldn’t make any jokes about Chinese language.

In Airstrip One I shall be called Doubleplusegg.

A joke based on Orwell’s 1984, where Airstrip One is England and bad things are

“doubleplusungood”

In Italy I am Il Huevatore;

A joke on the Italian opera title Il Trovatore.

and there are those who call me Tim.

A direct quote from the character Tim the Enchanter, who appears in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Aye, why did H.D. cross the road? To get away from a chef.”

A variant on the old kids’ joke: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from Colonel Sanders.”

“What happened to your son?” asked Lorena.
“He hatched into a cockatrice,” said H.D.


Medieval bestiaries state that cockatrices hatch from chicken eggs.

...

Again, I am not disputing that this material might be unnecessary to the plot. I don’t even question the assertion that it should be cut, as there is a strong case for doing that. The counter-argument, however, is that in Carroll’s original, there were a lot of scholarly jokes that young readers could not unpack without help, and for me to have a few is in the spirit of the original book, which it was my goal to reproduce.

Back in July 2014, I was planning to perpetrate an April Fools' hoax on my students by telling them to analyze a ridiculously bad poem. I wrote the bad poem and created a goodreads posting to legitimize it. As it turned out, I never played that joke on my students. The original unused post is below. I am the actual author of the poem.


Someone has just emailed me this poem. I hadn't heard of author Melinda Fragonard Sittingstar before. Apparently she is a student of Naomi Shihab Nye. Please comment. If I get enough comments, I will look up Ms. Sittingstar and interview her.


The Dustbin of History
by Melinda Fragonard Sittingstar

The mazy musky mongrel marks the muffin
With a thin stream, a yellow stream
Piffling like steamy stark spray.
Hast thou that muffin of doom?
It doth strike with gaseous aplomb.
O mongrel! O muffin!
Pfft!
And beside that doom Momma wept, her tears streaming,
streaming,
O Momma! Gingham Momma!
Thy heart is a dark hat. Muévase!
Le Pan Perdu. Ich bin Berliner.
Culling the herd, in the shady corner where sunlight
is omnipresent equipoise.
Ay the mongrel he doth wish
to move yon stub of tail O swish! O! Swish!
I shall be telling the tale ages
and ages and (cotton) and
ages and ages and
ages and
Enough of that. Mongrel mongrel mongriel.
Pied mongrel, velveteen mongrel, felt mongriel.
Delta-strewn musky bulbous daughter of
the silk-sown sky's stark bastard
(no, not that one, the other one)
momma muffin mongrel Weltzschmerz
O!

These ideas about education need to be in the public discourse.

Here they are, from me.

The primary responsibility for a child's education lies with the parent's ability to make the child care about education. A motivated child will prosper even with a below-average teacher. Children don't do well in school these days mainly because they don't value school but see it as an obstacle to their pleasure in life.

While there are some poorly-performing teachers, they are a very small minority, probably a smaller number than the number of poorly-performing people in the general workforce.

Economics are an undeniable factor in school performance. To make kids better at school, improve the economy. Improve the nationwide standard of living; get people out of poverty. When parents are home at night and kids have food and clothes and don't have to get jobs, school performance will improve.

It is not necessary for education to be standardized, with every child being taught the same way. Every child should have a variety of teachers with different approaches and personalities, which is reflective of the variable and even chaotic experience the child will have out of school. As long as every teacher has skills and is not a bumbling incompetent, it should work out on the average.

Independent thinking and reasoning skills are necessary, but kids who care about their education will develop them by osmosis not only by seeing teachers demonstrate them, but by seeing THEIR PARENTS demonstrate them.

Children don't learn in terms of discrete packets, but in wildly varied ways. A child may not grasp something until years after it is taught, or may get it only after failing a test. Some children can't test well. Using testing as the dominant determination of student learning is an abomination for students. Using it to measure teachers' job performance is a cynical gimmick.

The standard classroom arrangement, with desks in rows and the teacher delivering content or giving silent work, is preferred by most students and works better. When assigned to learn on their own in groups, most students shut down or goof off. There are classrooms with kids who do better in that scenario and are lively, but they are unusual. You can't expect such peak classroom performances to become the norm.

The goal of educating students should not be to prepare them for corporate and office jobs. Not everyone belongs in that sort of job. In the present system, we are trying to train them to do analytical reasoning at a complex level, but not teaching them practical skills like cooking, typing, or balancing a checkbook.

It should not be necessary to go to college in order to get ready for a job. College is for people who are good at more complex learning tasks. People who aren't at ease performing such tasks should receive another sort of career professional training. Somewhere down the line, politicians or the media have confused two ideas. One, the correct one, is that college should be open to everyone, meaning that it shouldn't be closed to lower classes, minorities, or women. The other, the incorrect one, is that because college graduates make more money, everyone must be a college graduate. That isn't necessary! All you need is to have training schools for jobs that also make more money. The liberal arts curriculum is a waste of time for people whose personalities aren't suited to absorbing it. In present conditions, colleges are turning out large numbers of unemployable graduates. The job market can't accommodate a situation in which all Americans have college degrees and expect office jobs. That's ridiculous.

Teachers should have secure jobs because when their jobs are threatened, they don't perform well. Teachers should have secure jobs because they undergo large amounts of training and preparation for a moderate- to low-paying profession and are subject to the vagaries of chance in terms of the classroom. Teachers should have secure jobs because on the whole, excepting a few villains, they care about children and do extra to care for them. It's a profession that serves society and that has the potential for inherent nobility.

Detailed lesson plans are just paperwork. Some teachers need more detail than others, depending upon how their minds work. It also varies from lesson to lesson, day to day, class to class. The focus on lesson plans and unit plans and other such stuff is really about accountability, which is a corporate concept. It doesn't make sense in education.

Here is an out-take from Simon Dusty Duringer's interview at my School of the Ages site.

Tell an interesting story from both your writing life and other.

This is one that covers both your questions; within yet not quite within my writing life. I apologise for amalgamating the two… but you readers may appreciate it as this is a fairly long story in its own right.
This 100% true story reinforces the words of the English Author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who in 1839 coined the phrase; “The pen is mightier than the sword”.

Furthermore, perhaps it may offer hope an alternative to fists for those who have found themselves, through no fault of their own, to be the subject of bullying…

I joined the Royal Air Force much older and (I thought) wiser than most other recruits. I had completed what you might call my first ‘tour’ in life; I was married and my eldest son Jonathan was a toddler. I had been a multi award winning salesman and experienced various degrees of success in the world of business.

Prior to joining I had researched what is expected of recruits during training and felt well prepared for the challenge. I set about doing my best from Day 1…

What I had never considered was that my evaluation might have been flawed and in actual fact the measure of a good recruit was not by being competent from day 1, in fact quite the opposite, it was by demonstrating continuous improvement, regardless of actual ability throughout training. Therefore by starting off firing on all cylinders with a bucket full of knowledge had actually been a real and distinct disadvantage.

Looking back, it was probably for my own benefit that, instructors appeared to concoct inefficiencies and discrepancies with my work. This would enable them to report a gradual improvement in my performance. But, I was naïve of this possibility; I wasn’t having any of it. I mean, I was either going completely bonkers or I was being set up. My first few weeks during training were therefore about as miserable as they could possibly be. Things came to a head when I was called to the Sergeant’s office….
I entered, approached the Sergeant sitting behind her desk and brought myself to attention. But, within moments a hefty corporal who had stood behind the desk approached me. He became up close and personal. The proximity of the man’s face to mine set me slightly off balance at which time; his temper became apparent, his pitch became a squeal, and he ordered me, though I wonder to this day given the volume of the order how many recruits stopped abruptly in their tracks around the base and followed the order, back to “Attention”.

Now, fear affects different people in different ways, I couldn’t afford to fail this training, but for me fear, in the short term anyway, certainly did not help my cause.

Firstly, my brain engaged with the “Attention” command, I raised my leg high and brought my foot down hard, figuring to make as much noise as I could when my boot made contact with the ground, and achieving just that.
As my size 9 boot slammed against the wooden floor with an immensely gratifying crack, the expression on the corporal’s face changed. Not the change I had anticipated. Rather a brief look of surprise, quickly reverting to the bulging bloodshot eyes and most fierce of war faces…. Now standing to attention and at a loss for words I completely froze. I stood there waiting. I think he might have taken this as a form of challenge and for several moments neither of us retreated an inch.

But he had clearly breached my airspace, any closer and his immaculately cropped moustache might have tickled my top lip. I was confronted by a man drunk, nay paralytic, on the power of his chevrons, and whilst he appeared to be in a battle of stares, I was simply frozen to the spot, terrified to move…

To this day I don’t know where, why or how this situation gave rise to a wandering mind… But, I was suddenly reminded of all manner of big screen, stereotypical, drill instructors; Heartbreak Ridge and Full Metal Jacket were in there somewhere before my mind finally came to rest with some characters from the legendary U.K. television comedy called Dad’s Army.
Now, hindsight is a wonderful thing…
I know now that I should have recognised immediately that once my mind had drifted off into this chain of thought, that one way or another, I would be doomed. Perhaps then I might, whilst I still had an opportunity, have launched some sort of ‘thinking’ counter measure. In my defence I do recall, the more I tried to dismiss the thoughts, the worse my predicament became, until eventually, I simply couldn’t contain myself. My tugging and flinching stomach muscles had forced all the air to my mouth, which in turn was already beginning to make my face twitch involuntarily, the corners of my mouth rising inappropriately.

I was sharing airspace with a corporal whom had complete control over my fate and the only ‘uncontrollable’ thought I could muster up was that of one of the most hilarious wartime comedies I have ever seen. I did what any individual drowning in panic might have done in that situation really…. I attempted to relax my body muscles as best I could. But as the tension in my facial muscles dissipated a huge smirk began to replace the look of pain and any hope that the pressure of the air would disperse gently disappeared. It didn’t happen. In fact it was like the opening of an over pressurised valve. Things got incredibly worse, very quickly, and as the pressure of withheld laughter grew to an uncontrollable level I bowed my head to avoid further eye contact and let the air splutter out as I tried to catch my breath and gain control of myself….
Now you’d be forgiven for thinking that was the end of this escapade…

Surely nothing else could go wrong, indeed nothing else needed to go wrong, yet sadly that’s not the case. What I noticed next reversed all previous evidence of laughter or smiling from my person. Indeed, I felt such powerful shockwaves through my body that I do believe I was experiencing a panic attack. It was as though the used and exhaled air, that moments previous had fought to escape my lungs, had now appraised the situation outside my body and quickly decided it might be safer returning from whence it came and, without any element of oxygen it previously carried, it re-entered my body as Carbon Dioxide, creating an impasse; no air in, no air out! The cause of this sudden reversal in expression and subsequent panic attack had been that as I had bowed my head, my eyes had naturally followed and on seeing the floor realised that my right size 9 toecap was perched on top of where his left, meticulously polished toecap should have been.

Running out of ideas and realising I was about to experience the effects of napalm up close and personally, and in a last ditch attempt to get out of the office in one piece, I remembered the proverb; “Attack is the best form of defence” and I purposefully stood back up and locked eyes with the corporal to divert his attention, knowing full well if he looked away first he would lose face yet simply terrified of what would almost certainly come next. It kinda worked, temporarily anyway.

I was ordered out of the office by the sergeant who had remained silent throughout. So, with no explanation as to why I had been summoned in the first place, the corporal marched me out of the office, slamming the door on my back as I went.

For all of about 5 seconds I actually convinced myself that might be the end of the matter, but before I had got out of sight of the office, I am guessing the beast that remained within it, must have caught sight of his irreparable toe cap, and he immediately, and very audibly, erupted….

Whilst I could go on to explain what took place next and over the coming days, perhaps I should save that for my memoires! But all in all I think you have the gist that I was in big trouble and remained so for a number of weeks until I was called back into the Sergeants Office. She had with her some paper of mine and it made me scared…. The paper was a first draft of a short and satirical story about life as a recruit. It took on a very light hearted and sarcastic viewpoint of training and the characters I had met during training so far. But to my incredible surprise and relief the Sergeant brought me in to the office not to discipline me, yet to inform me that she had confiscated the story which would be published within the Halton Gazette! A number of months later it was also published nationally….
As a result of the article, rightly or otherwise, the instructors changed favourably towards me, I actually enjoyed the remainder of my training and went on to design the flight shirts and win The Best Shot Award…. So, it really does go to show that Edward Bulwer-Lytton was right:

“The pen is mightier than the sword”.

I will soon finish rereading Chaim Potok's The Chosen which I am scheduled to teach to honors English 11. I have always read it for pleasure before, so reading it as a teacher feels pretty different. For the first time, I have begun to figure out why the novel starts out with so much stuff about eyes and blindness. It has to do with realizing the true self vs. being blind to one's identity. The final words of Part Two, "The only thing different about him was that he was now wearing glasses"(from reading too much) have broken the novel open for me in that regard.

The Chosen was a pivotal text in the construction of The Ghost in the Crystal. As I have acknowledged in other places, my character of Yakov Mermelstein is a variation upon Potok's Danny Saunders. Both are expected to be inheritors of their hereditary Chasidic rabbinical families, but whereas Danny's intelligence draws him to explore the world beyond the enclave, Yakov's personality causes him to fear that world and to resist it violently. As Danny, raised to be exclusively religious, is drawn out of his community and to a less rigid form of faith, so Yakov, who does not want to leave, has to do so in order to become more religious in the end.

The connection between the two characters may not be obvious, except that both use the term apikoros against their novels' protagonists, Danny against Reuven and Yakov against Simon, albeit for very different reasons. But I feel the connections very strongly.

Deborah Feldman, the famous young author of Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, read The Ghost in the Crystal and sent me a few remarks through a mutual friend. (I have never met Deborah.) I won't share all these remarks, but one was that she felt my version of Chasidism was too nice. I don't know about that. I know that my version owes a lot to Potok, who views the Chasidim with some sympathy (having left Chasidism just as Danny does).

I have limited personal experience with Chasidim, much more with Orthodox Jews, for whom I worked as an English teacher in three very different yeshivot in the early 2000s. My experience was that they were just people, and some were as kind as others were heartless. I think this is the only way I can write about people, as a mixed bunch.

I also owe some of my perception of Jews as characters to a fair bit of reading in Isaac Bashevis Singer, but I'll save that for another time.

I am not going to make fun of Kristen Stewart. I understand literary aspirations very well. But let me try to explain what is right and wrong in her poem.

Kristen Stewart does have verbal talent, but she just hasn't refined her craft. This work reminds me of the overly serious and ultimately failed poetry in an undergraduate workshop. Like many novice poets, she feels that she needs to be ambiguous or unclear in order to be taken seriously, which is why she has created unclear expressions like "digital moonlight" and "abrasive organ pumps" and "pining erosion." I would advise her to look at the work of poets like Frost, who seem to be speaking clearly but sometimes mean the opposite of what they are saying. For example, "Good fences make good neighbors" is quoted as if Frost meant it, when arguably he meant the opposite ("people shouldn't erect emotional or social fences as much as they do"). Clarity of language, with subtlety of implication, will work much better for her.

I would also advise her not to create new words ("kismetly" is no good because you can only add -ly to an adjective, and kismet is a noun) and to avoid expressions that are unintentionally funny ("freedom pole" reads as a clumsy avoidance of directly saying "penis"). While I love alliteration, if it doesn't sound good in your mind's ear ("stare down sun snuck") then it should not exist. Another of her alliterations, "devil's not done digging" does sound good, although its meaning is profoundly unclear in context.


I can make an educated guess at what she means in certain places. In the last stanza, while her refusal to be grammatical is sadly obscurantist, I can form the interpretation that she is so emotionally invested in another person that she stares at the person ("my eyes") watching for any small gesture ("I'm drunk on your morsels") and feeling intoxicated by what little she can get. A "twitch hand drum salute" is kind of a morsel. As a person with the habit of drumming or tapping to deal with stress or boredom, I can actually recognize this as a somewhat more coherent element.

My Heart Is A Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole

By Kristen Stewart

"I reared digital moonlight/
You read its clock, scrawled neon across that black/
Kismetly … ubiquitously crest fallen/
Thrown down to strafe your foothills/
…I’ll suck the bones pretty.

Your nature perforated the abrasive organ pumps/
Spray painted everything known to man/
Stream rushed through and all out into/
Something Whilst the crackling stare down sun snuck/
Through our windows boarded up/
He hit your flint face and it sparked.

And I bellowed and you parked/
We reached Marfa/
One honest day up on this freedom pole/
Devils not done digging/
He’s speaking in tongues all along the pan handle/
And this pining erosion is getting dust in/

My eyes/
And I’m drunk on your morsels/
And so I look down the line/
Your every twitch hand drum salute/
Salutes mine."

This was the "best story" in my Florida State master's thesis. It's a reflection upon my two years as a high school wrestler, although Carson Bean is not me; he's a far better athlete but with a worse attitude.

This was written in 1991 in a dingy apartment in Alumni Village in Tallahassee, Florida.

The story contains the f-word and other profanity, so kids, and people who don't like reading such language, stop reading now.

The ending originally did not have a period at the end of the last sentence. I have added the period only so no one thinks there is an error.




Head and Arm
by Matt Posner





I'm Carson Bean. I used to wrestle one-twenty-eight for River High School. I stopped the day of the North High match my senior year.

Most wrestling seasons I can't remember eating. You have to be in amazing shape without any food. If you’re overweight when you come in on match day, you have to cut water weight by working out. One of our lightweight wrestlers, Pat Gables, used to come in for match-day morning weigh-in four, five pounds over. The day of the North High match, Coach Schmidt took him out of class and told Raz, the assistant coach, to keep him running in the stairwell to lose the weight. Raz does all Schmidt's dirty work.

I found out what Pat was doing during second period math from Steve Drexel, the loudmouth 135-pounder who wrestles after me in the lineup. When I got a chance, I ducked out of class, saying I was headed for the bathroom, and went to watch Pat run. There he was, brown skin and arms and legs like a chicken's, pacing the stairs panting and squeezing his waist. His curly hair was flattened by sweat, and he was rattling from the plastic garbage bag under his T-shirt and shorts which made him sweat more. Raz was yelling at him. "Suck it up, Pat!"

Pat just groaned, "Come on, Raz, I'm tired."

Raz shouted, "You should have thought of that before you pigged out last night."

I watched Pat dragging his ass up and down the stairs for a while. Raz nodded at me and said, "You make weight?"

"Yeah, Raz."

"Then get back to class."

"Yeah." So I took off. Back to Mr. Wong's algebra class and having to smell Drexel’s goddamn cologne even though he was two seats away. Pat had a real racket going with the coaches. He ate when he wasn't supposed to, and as a reward he got to skip class all day. It pissed me off, so I skipped out of sixth period English and went down to the locker room to stretch out. When I got there the wrestling room was open and Pat was in the tub.

I don't think I saw them use the tub but one other time. Coach Schmidt said it wasn't really safe. Pat must have still been a pound or so over and too tired to run anymore; probably he’d had to beg Raz to let him go in there. I could feel the heat as soon as I walked in. It was a big smooth steel tub, and you filled it up with water as close to boiling as was safe, and then the guy got in to sweat. Pat was lying there in the tub with his mouth open and his eyes shut.
You weren't supposed to go in there by yourself. You had to have a coach around to make sure you didn't faint, so Raz was probably next door in the football room, or across the hall in the weight room. Coach Schmidt said one time that if you fell asleep in the tub and you didn't get out in time, the water would make your skin get loose on your body. I could imagine a guy's skin coming off and all the blood vessels getting ripped, so under the skin it was all blood, just like a piece of meat marinating in a plastic bag.
I sat down on the bench, and finally Raz came in with his stopwatch. Raz used to be a heavyweight, and even as a coach, at about one-eighty, he could still wrestle the two-hundred-pound guys on our team. He had red hair and freckles, and got the nickname Raz 'cause one time he got sunburned and somebody said he looked like a raspberry. When he finally came in, he’d changed to the same River High shirt and the same pair of tan shorts he always wore on match days. I figured that when Raz was wrestling, he probably picked one move and stuck with it, and when it came to life he must have done the same thing, like, he wore the same clothes, ate the same foods, drove the same make of car, his girlfriends all had the same color hair and he met them all in the same singles bar. I'm like that. I just do the head-and-arm every match. If the guy I'm wrestling gets out, I keep doing it till I stick him or he sticks me.

Pat said, "Hey, man, I'm sweating my ass off in here."

"You're so skinny you don't even have an ass," Raz said. “Fucking toothpick."

"Yeah, fuck you, Raz," Pat said.

"You check weight yet?" Raz asked me. He forgot he’d already asked.

"This morning," I said. “I didn't eat anything today."

"Okay, no problem," Raz said. He clicked his stopwatch. "That's ten minutes, Pat. Get out."

Pat grabbed the edges of the tub and tried to pull himself out. He was too weak. "Aw, shit," he said. "Can't do it. Hey, Carson, give me a hand."

I got up and grabbed his forearms and pulled him up. He sat for a minute on the edge of the tub, then slowly swung his leg over. He held my arm, gripping painfully with his bony fingers, as I helped him walk, dripping and naked, to the scale outside in the main locker room. In wrestling, just like in boxing, they weigh you with the kind of scale a doctor has. The scale was shaking at one-oh-seven-and-a-half.

"One-oh-eight," Raz said. "Good job, Pat. Hit the shower."

"Yeah." Pat limped around the corner.
"How about you, Carson?" Raz asked. "You ready for Simpson?"

I had to wrestle Stuart Simpson that night in the dual meet. Simpson was district champion last year. He'd pinned me twice last season.

"I guess," I said.

"You know, Coach Schmidt and I were talking, and we both think you could beat Simpson if you'd just give up on the head-and-arm," Raz said. "I bet you a hundred dollars. You tried it and tried it last year, but it just doesn't work on him. Try some of that shooting I showed you yesterday."

"Yeah." Raz had drilled me and Drexel on an outside single-leg while the rest of the team was running the stairs. You glide around the guy, keep your head up and scoop the ankle and then step back, pull the leg just enough so he loses his balance and goes down on his belly. Then you get on top, control an arm and an ankle, and you have a two-point takedown. You don't have to lock up, so you don't give the other guy a chance to control your body. We drilled, and Drexel got the move and liked it, but for me it was just bullshit. I had to think to do it right, and wrestling isn't about thinking. If you need time to think, you're going to lose. You have to do it, as quickly and accurately as possible. It has to be an instinct. You do it by feel because your body knows the way to move, knows where the other guy's supposed to be and which way you're moving, even knows the way your singlet's supposed to wrinkle and which way your sweat flies off. Shooting just didn't feel right to me. Sure, maybe that's why I couldn't beat Simpson. I hated the way he walked into a locker room, swaggering, his nose up, those proud blue eyes of his. I wanted to pin the bastard, but only my way. Lock up, hook the forearm, and in one, smooth, snakelike strike, your hip goes into the body and your other arm goes around the shoulders and you tilt and dump the sonofabitch over your hip and fall on top, now controlling the arm and the head. Your whole weight goes onto the shoulders and you brace on your legs and you use your feet to steer and stay on top as he squirms. Keep your center of gravity on the shoulders, keep the pressure on, till you hear the ref hit the mat BANG mighty as thunder on a sunlit day, and you are the winner and you have dominated.

"Got to go make sure Pat doesn't drink the shower water," Raz said. I went back into the wrestling room, stripped, put on my spare singlet and a pair of shorts and started to stretch out. I did hurdler’s stretch, and my legs were so stiff that it hurt a lot. To distract from the pain I said my name. Carson Bean, Carson Bean. Carson Bean sticks Stuart Simpson. Carson Bean rubs Simpson's shoulders in the sweat and the grit. Ref checks the shoulders, then BLAM! hits the mat as hard as he can and blows the whistle. Pin! Carson Bean is on top. Brrrrstickem. You punk. Teach you to mess with Carson Bean.

Out of the hurdler's stretch into a full back neck bridge. Up on your toes and the top of your head, get your shoulders as far off the mat as you can. In the wrestling room there was about a third of an inch of carpet between the top of my head and concrete, so the floor was grinding my hair and pressing on my scalp. I arched back with the muscles above the shoulders bunching together, back straining, touched my nose, held it...Yeah. I'm Carson Bean. I'm five and three this season. Carson Bean, one hundred twenty-eight pounds of serious head-and-arm action. Outside the wrestling room, I heard Pat groaning, "I gotta take a nap, Raz."

"Yeah, go ahead, lie down," Raz said.

Scrub.

*
North High showed up at six-thirty. The JV match was supposed to be at seven. Whenever another team comes in I always look them over and guess who wrestles what weight and which guy is JV and which guy is varsity. There are always a few you can peg right away as new guys: tall thin guys, or guys with fat guts, or guys without any bruises on their faces, guys with skin so clean and smooth you know they've been drinking as much water as they felt like and after the match they probably go home and eat doughnuts and drink chocolate milk.
North High’s team stood around really quietly by some lockers talking in low voices. Coach Schmidt, who's short and built and has gray and black hair, knew their coach real well, so they were laughing as they checked over their charts and compared teams. Most of the rest of the team came out of the wrestling and football rooms to look North High over, but a few still hung out, like Pat, who didn't want to get up till he had to. Some of my teammates were still screwing around, telling dirty jokes and all that, but mostly we were real quiet, same as North High was. Funny how you hate guys who are into the same sport you are just because they're on a rival team.

Simpson, who was North High’s captain, had his foot up on a bench by the lockers, showing off his faded blue jeans and his cowboy boot, looking around the room with his eyes like goddamn vegetable peelers.

Finally the ref came in from the side door at a jog, apologized for being late, and we all stripped for weigh-in. We lined up by weight, varsity guy then JV guy. There was that kind of heavy, greasy, tangy smell you get when a lot of guys take their clothes off at the same time, the kind of smell that hits you in the face if you walk into it from fresh air. Then there was Drexel, in line not far behind me, with a fresh dose of his obnoxious cologne. Next to me was Simpson, buck-naked, strutting like a gunfighter. He was better built than me but still came in two pounds under weight.

After weigh-in, we got into our uniforms and went up to the gym. We'd rolled out and taped the mats that morning, also set up the chairs for the teams on either side, and Coach Schmidt had already opened up the folding bleachers, so all we had to do was sit around till match time. Most of the guys pulled out sandwiches and apples and bananas. The bleachers were still pretty empty except for parents of the JV team, sisters and girlfriends, and some football players wearing green North High shirts with the sleeves torn off to show their triceps and the sides ripped open to show their deltoids. The North High varsity came in and climbed up into the bleachers with them. Finally the coaches came up with the ref, and River High’s basketball coach, Dean "Duke" Brunner, in collar shirt, tie, slacks, and sneakers, followed them a minute later and went to the scorer's table. He messed with some controls, and the scoreboards, one on each end of the gym, blared and went on. The coaches gave him the record books to keep score in.

Finally the North High JV came in and warmed up, then took their seats and our guys came in. You can really tell a lot about a guy's attitude by what he looks like running on the mat. If he's got his shoulders out and he's breathing heavy, he's psyched up and wants to fight. If his head's down and he keeps looking side to side, he cut weight last night and he's tired and trying to get his blood flowing. Some of our guys were so out of it they couldn't keep their legs down for the hurdler's stretch. Didn't they know how pathetic they were? Didn't they know they lost matches because they were soft, clumsy, and lax? I'd been sick since seeing Pat in the stairwell, and I'd thought it was just hunger, but I looked at them and I knew it was scrubs who made me sick.

While the JV teams were wrestling, the gym filled up. There were two sets of bleachers, one on each side, and the two football teams sat on opposite sides and taunted each other while most of our JV got stuck. Then all the guys who just wrestled shook hands with North High's JV and went to the locker room to change, and the River High varsity warmed up. As always, I had to spar with Steve Drexel. He's our 135-pounder, tall, thin, strong legs, runs cross-country. He wears that cheap crappy cologne, I guess to cover up his body odor, and it always makes me sick whenever I’m around him. I did an easy head-and-arm on him; we got up and he did that outside single leg Raz had drilled us on.

"Come on, man," he whispered when we locked up again. "Why don't you do one?"

"I don't want to," I said.

"Listen, Carson, Simpson's gonna stick you if you don't."

I head-and-armed him, hard. I heard his breath go out, and he got up coughing and holding his neck. I figured the whole gym had noticed, but I looked around and no one had.

"What's your problem?" Drexel said.

"Just don't fuck with me."

The team huddled up in the center of the mat. We could all hear and feel each other breathing. Scott Bach, our captain, the 188-pounder, gave his usual kind of pep talk. "All right, this is it. Biggest match of the year. We can beat these fuckers, just remember keep your head up and keep moving. By the grace of God, amen." Then, light to heavy, we broke out of the huddle, ran once round the mat and over to our seats.
North High ran in clapping and chanting their war cry. Then, smooth as ballet, they were spread out in pairs throwing moves on each other. When they fell, it echoed in the gym, but after each move, no one ever went down; they hit their switches faster than you could snap your fingers. Simpson went to the center and shouted instructions: "Push-ups! Go! One! Two! Three! Four! Five!"

"Yeah, yeah," I said to Drexel. "He can count. Smart guy."

"Man, don't talk to me," Drexel said. "I hope he sticks you."

"Fuck you," I said. "I hope Jenks sticks you, too."

"Well, at least he didn't stick me the last two times I wrestled him," Drexel said.

I should have felt like hitting him, but instead my body got more cold and stiff, and I turned away, and even as I shook my head there was pressure on the back of my chair and a shadow fell over me. Coach Schmidt had his hands on both our seat-backs and was leaning over to whisper at both of us. "You guys got a problem?"

Drexel didn't say anything. I said, "Yeah, coach. I don't want to shoot on Simpson."

Coach Schmidt shook his head. "If you won't shoot on him, at least try to keep off your back."

"Yeah, thanks a lot, coach."

The coach whispered in my ear, "I'm not your mommy, and I don't care about your fucking temper tantrums. You don't want my advice, don't take it, but you’re screwing the team with your bad attitude. Got it?”

He walked away, and I muttered, "Fuck you, coach," under my breath.

North High ran around the mat again and went to their seats. The scoreboard blared as "Duke" Brunner cleared the JV score; the ref went out on the mat, blew his whistle and gestured for the hundred-pounders to come out on the mat.

The match went to the second period. I saw the end; our man, Mick Daniels, was bridging, his thin knees were up in the air, and the ref was checking the shoulder blades with his hand and they were clear and then they weren't and POW! the ref hit the mat and his whistle squealed Both wrestlers stood up and the ref raised the other guy's hand. They shook hands and walked off the mat and Pat Gables went trotting out, kind of awkwardly like he was lame, fit on his headgear and snapped it closed and put his feet on the line.

Across from him was Roger Fisher, who'd been wrestling varsity for North High three years already. Fisher was a blond guy who had so much muscle it looked like his skin might break when he moved. And there was Pat: the only difference between him and a broom was he had arms and legs. Pat had spent every minute he could all day sleeping so he'd have some energy for this match. How the hell was he going to hold out? Good. Stick him, Fisher. They touched hands, a slap not a shake, and the ref blew the whistle. They circled. Pat kept his arms in front of him, moved them slowly, twisted them out of grips Fisher tried. Fisher shot--slid a knee down and forward, reached for Pat's thighs, but Pat stepped back, pushed his head down, kind of jumped or slipped around him. Fisher was trying to keep moving in a circle so Pat couldn't get behind, but Pat was taller and he kept one hand on Fisher's back and with the other grabbed an ankle, put weight on Fisher and broke him down to his belly. Two point takedown. Typical lazy wrestling from Pat--took him almost no energy compared to Fisher's shot. And Pat was lying on him, let the ankle go and got an elbow. As Fisher tried to push up, Pat chopped the elbow in toward Fisher's body and he fell again and Pat brought his other arm up, worming it or wriggling it under the other elbow and across to the back of Fisher's blond head--half-nelson--and at the same time he was holding Fisher's other wrist, stretching Fisher's arm out so he couldn't use it to push up, and Pat scooted his waist off Fisher and began to run the half with his whole body, to turn Fisher over on his back. No way Fisher was going to let that happen. He kicked with his legs so he kept moving the direction Pat was going and Pat couldn't turn him. Pat lost the wrist and Fisher turned his head and peeled Pat's half-nelson away. Pat spun on him trying to get another grip and Fisher was on his knees, and then he thrust up. Pat came up slower holding his waist from behind, heaved and had him in the air and was going to bring him down on his butt and did, but Fisher had his arm back and he switched and now he was on top--two point reversal--and he was strong and he threw a half, caught Pat's leg to throw him over by force. Pat tried to go flat, but in seconds he was on his back bridging and trying to roll to his belly. The ref was counting back points. Pat squirmed to his belly quick enough that Fisher only got two back points. He started to get to his base and Fisher chopped the elbow and broke him down and started to turn him again and then the ref blew the whistle and Fisher got off and the ref signaled for the trainer. Our trainer went scooting out on the mat and bent over Pat, who was holding his waist and writhing around on the mat.

"Give me a break," I said. "I'm sick of Pat pulling this shit."

"Man, shut up," Drexel said.

I did. Up in the bleachers, North High's football team starting chanting, "Poor baby! Poor baby!" as loud as they could. Finally the trainer scooted off the mat and Pat crawled to the center of the mat and got in the down position, on all fours, his hands in front of him and in front of one line of tape, his knees behind another line, and the ref checked him and then gestured and Fisher got on top, one hand on his elbow, the other on his belly, the ref checked that, stepped back, and blew the whistle.

Fisher broke Pat down again, moved his other hand off his belly and got an ankle, but Pat sat out, Fisher lost the ankle and went back to the belly and tried to get him down on the side where he had the elbow, Pat tried a switch and screwed it up and he was on his back again. He bridged up, shot his free arm through and he was on his belly too fast for back points. He got to his base and sat out and reached around behind and caught Fisher by the back of the head. That was the desperate, knob-knuckled grip that had almost bruised me when I helped him from the tub to the scale earlier, and I knew Pat’s fingers wouldn’t slip, that he was clutching so tightly that Fisher’s skull could be warping from the pressure.

"Don't reach back!" Coach Schmidt bellowed, but Pat knew what he was doing and in a minute so did I. It was some crazy move he got at wrestling camp. I don't know how he did it, but somehow he pulled Fisher over his shoulder to his back. It was slow, Pat was pulling, he had his back and his triceps into it and Fisher’s greater strength should have let him break free, but finally he slid across Pat's shoulder and Pat got a leg and cradled him up, clasped his hands together, got a wide base with his legs and Fisher with all his muscles couldn't get out. He rolled and he bridged the best he could with just his neck and one foot, but I could tell, everyone could tell, Pat had him. It was nice and slow. Pat got his three back points and then settled in to wear Fisher out, used his weight instead of his muscles as much as he could. The ref checked and checked. I felt how my teeth were locked and my hands were wet. I wiped them on my singlet and Pat had his weight on the guy and I rubbed my forehead and Pat had his weight on the guy and I ran my hand through my hair and Pat had his weight on the guy and the ref slammed the mat and blew the whistle and Fisher was stuck. Pat let the cradle go and just lay there. Fisher got up and was massaging the back of his neck and Pat was just lying there like a pulped fruit.
And it hit me how wrong that was. It was wrong, Pat the lazy fuck lying there like he was dead. What an insult it was to Fisher and Coach Schmidt and Raz and the trainer and the rest of the North High team, an insult to me and to everyone. He was laughing at everyone, like he did it all without anything to do it with. He was weak and useless and he'd won anyway and he was laughing while he lay there, laughing and slapping us in the face It was wrong! Didn't anyone else see it? Didn't they see, the jeering football teams and the JV guys limping back into the gym with cokes from the locker room soda machine and "Duke" Brunner who didn't know how to dress and the fat parents losing their hair and wearing cheap jewelry and all the girlfriends and sisters in their shorts or jeans and loose school-colors T-shirts, didn't they see him laughing at them, laughing at Fisher, laughing at me?

"Pat!" I shouted. "Pat, get up, you lazy fuck!" I got out of my chair and ripped off my loose headgear and threw it at him where he was lying on the mat. "Get the fuck up!"

Drexel got up too, and he grabbed my shoulder. "Cool it!"

I brushed his hand off. "Don't touch me."

And Pat was slowly getting up as I pushed Drexel and he fell back over his chair and his own loose headgear fell off and bounced and he hit the hard court shoulder-first and got tangled in the folding chair as it closed up. The 121-pounder who had been sitting on my other side grabbed me and I elbowed him in the gut. I saw Coach Schmidt running toward me and the ref coming off the mat, and Scott Bach, the captain, who was twice my size, was coming too as Drexel wormed his legs out of the chair and rolled free. Pat was limping off the mat with a dumb, puzzled look in his watery eyes, and I heard the noise in the bleachers grow louder and when they grabbed me I looked over at Simpson.