I extend my gratitude to Rube Goldberg.
I cannot be remiss in forgetting the influence of Mr. Ray Guy—Professor Ray Guy—on my entire life, from front yard punt-offs with neighborhood kids (sorry about the window, car panels, bird feeder, and dog, Mrs. Irwin!) when I sailed my Wilson or Spaulding footballs high over telephone lines into next-door lawns back in Forty-Five, right on up to how I live my life today. Ray Guy—the only punter to have ever been drafted in the first round, who averaged 42.4 yards per punt over a thirteen or fourteen year career, who never had a punt returned for a touchdown, who graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi (not that far from where I received my low-residency master’s degree in Southern culture studies at Ole Miss-Taylor), who wears three Super Bowl rings proudly, who had five punts go over sixty yards in one season, who had opponents test his balls for helium because they hung so long—made all of those Pro Bowl teams, and he’s not in the Hall of Fame in Canton. Now, I must keep Ray Guy in mind should, perhaps, my book No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee end up getting a lot of attention, sell 100,000 copies, then never win the Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award.
I would like to thank the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award selection committees for their on-target selections in every category over all these years.
Anyway, a thousand thanks to Ray Guy, professional punter, who stayed on my mind every time that my long snapper, Chester Clabo, hiked the ball back to me, and then I didn’t have a 42.4 yard punt, and had countless punt returners catch the line drives and return them for touchdowns when I didn’t shank the thing off into the bleachers. Thanks for fucking up my mind and causing me to shank all those punts, Ray Guy, which got me kicked off the team at Vanderbilt, which drove me straight to the library, which got me interested in the life of the mind, as they say—or at least what that mass-murderer Charlie character says to Barton Fink in the classic movie Barton Fink. I couldn’t have done Columbus Choice justice without you, Ray. Maybe one day I’ll come down to Georgia or wherever you live in retirement and have a punt-off with you. I hope you don’t have neighbors.
Ronaldo Rash was a regular at the VFW, listening to Mighty Max, and I want to thank Ronaldo for making me appear almost normal when it came to dealing with Drink for Free Ladies Night: “Hey, you ever have a Rash on your vagina?” Ronaldo used to say to women. They’d go, “No! No, I’m a clean, STD-free woman!” because it’s impossible to see capital letters in regular everyday spoken words. And he’d go, “Well, would you like a little Rash on your vagina?”
I wouldn’t have met Ronaldo had I not misread the sign out front that first time and thought it meant, “Drink for Free Ladies Night,” as in “If You Win Some Kind of Drinking Contest, then You’ll Get a Free Lady.”
I am oddly grateful to Mr. Randall Brewer (father of two) at Nationwide Insurance for providing Mr. Joe Smythe (father of four) with personal injury coverage. And I want to thank Nationwide for “settling out of court.” Listen, to the end of my days I’ll argue that A) it doesn’t matter if a person’s intoxicated when he’s walking across the street legally; and B) if a man (Mr. Smythe) and his wife (Mrs. Smythe) find it necessary to have four children in five years, even if they’re Mormon or Catholic or other cult members or whatever, then they (the Smythes) must understand that they just can’t drive around the Tennessee Valley with their heads craned into the back seat looking at their babies in car seats to make sure they all have their pacifiers shoved into their mouths. I mean, I know one must show some responsibility as a parent, but one must show even more responsibility as a driving parent.
The money I got for the settlement allowed me to A) continue No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee; and B) limp back to the Atomic Arms apartments where I had enough electrical outlets to plug in a laptop and type up what I had handwritten. And eat. And watch some TV so I could get back in touch with pop culture. And later make the mistake of going up to every obese person I ever came across and say, “Hey, aren’t you on The Biggest Loser?” like an idiot and get punched with a slow right-cross, which made me realize that I needed to stay inside more often and finish No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee.
Which made me call up Juanita Wilkins and say, “I know that I threw you out of class that time and embarrassed you to the point of making shit up to my department chairman and the dean, but I hope—seeing as you’re a good Christian—that you believe in forgiving people, and seeing as you’re the only person I really know here in town with any kind of background in medicine, because you’re a certified phlebotomist and all, could you please come over here and take a look at the hematoma on my eye socket?”
It’s not as hard to thank unknown people as it may seem. I wish to offer my gratitude in advance to the kind, hard-working, detail-oriented comrades at the Library of Congress, in charge of “cataloguing-in-publication.” I can only be presumptuous here, but I’d be willing to bet that y’all are more anal retentive than copyeditors, what with having to make sure my name’s spelled correctly, and you got down the year of my birth right, and so on. Who gets to decide all those little taglines about the book’s major themes in the CIP data? I would put down Biography/ History/African-American History/Customs of the South/Social Life/Secrecy/Military History/Food/Tennessee/Town Life/ Alternative Lifestyles (but not that way)/Buddha/Nuclear Power Predicaments/20th Century/Racism/Raw Fish. Feel free to add anything else. I won’t mind if you put in there something like “Punting.”
And y’all have to be comfortable and well-versed in math—ISBN numbers are really getting up there in regards to digits, aren’t they? It isn’t like the old days, when the first printed book ever had “ISBN 0-1-1-1” down there on page iv. What was that book, anyway? Was it the Gutenberg Bible? Was it one of those ancient Chinese texts that didn’t survive? Was it something by Joyce Carol Oates, or maybe even the actress Shirley MacLaine—who would be perfect for playing the part of librarian Gloretta Knoblock in a movie version of Columbus Choice—in a previous life?
These are questions way beyond my abilities to answer them. These are questions that can only be answered by a Supreme Being, and the outright amazing employees at the Library of Congress. Bless you all, prematurely!
Not that I’ve ever read every word that he wrote, but I want to offer my undying support to Frederick Exley—who got brought up in New York, though I understand him as a southern writer—and who somehow spanned the gap between fiction and nonfiction way back in the 1960s, long before all this ruckus occurred about people who said they wrote nonfiction that ended up being fiction, and all these people who wrote fiction that ended up being nonfiction. Frederick Exley had a thing for football in his work A Fan’s Notes. Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that I had something to do with football. Frederick Exley sometimes drank too much and made some inappropriate decisions. I have drunk too much and made inappropriate decisions. Frederick Exley spent a lot of time in mental institutions, and living on his widowed mother’s couch, or his aunt’s couch, or friends’ couches.
I never got the opportunity to go that far, but I still have time.
Columbus Choice, as I pointed out in the chapter, “Choice Moments with Huddling,” considered his most soulful and inspirational and calm moments as occurring on Sunday mornings, right before NFL kickoffs, when he prepared his sushi counter and awaited for the after-church masses to enter in need of The Halftime Report Roll, his biggest selling foot-long that included fish and pepperoni, plus lotus root that everyone around thought was just a hardened fancy yellow tomato or bell pepper.
Could it be that Columbus Choice met his untimely and disastrous death due to playing tricks on people? I hope not. What kind of God could hold it against him for hoping that the Lotus root might bring about a harmony to the people of lower middle central Tennessee? That just wouldn’t be fair, if you ask me. Poor C
olumbus Choice. If only he’d been brought up in a time when whitey allowed black men to feel comfortable about college. If only he’d been able to punt a football, and make it to college on an athletic scholarship. If only his Protestant congregation held enough sway to keep him from joining the Army to kill people in Southeast Asia, then returning to open up a sushi restaurant, which made him become viewed as an enemy to short-sighted, long-winded, no-toleranced rednecks like the Plemmons brothers. If only…
My platelets feel like miniature, flawed, unbalanced tires, bumping unevenly through my circulatory system. I hear them droning, a constant Om, as if that marching Jew’s harp band plays in the distance. Or they clack—like a pebble stuck in the deep treads of an otherwise good radial. I am grateful to the good pharmacists at Chase Drugs on Roane Street in Harriman for allowing me to come in and check my blood pressure a couple times a day, though I admit I’ve been remiss in doing so since having to finish up this Acknowledgment page. Maybe it’s time for some blood work from a qualified phlebotomist, working for a certified hematologist, running an oncology and hematology clinic in Oak Ridge.
Now it’s time.
No one in the publishing industry can say that I don’t deliver.
I hope I didn’t forget anyone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank everyone at Dzanc, especially new editor Guy Intoci. For putting up with me, still, Glenda Guion. For agreeing that I should not bow to the pressure of writing another novel—and that no writer should try to outguess what publishers may or may not want in the future—and for sending the last two manuscripts to Dzanc, I wish to thank the late Kit Ward, agent. I am grateful for the magazine and journal editors at the publications where most of these stories first appeared.
I would be remiss in not mentioning gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014, text by George Singleton.
Book design by Steven Seighman
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5482-2
This project is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.
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Between Wrecks Page 26