Vol. 2, No. 1: "Drop Shot Valley"

He’d put the throttle to the floor like rushed masonry. He’d simply drive through. When I was a child I watched a man lie dying in the street—the crowd orbiting bloodshed like a solar system taking shape. And now I am leaning to my left because the corner ahead is acute. That we will take a sharp turn and somehow keep on moving. The man in the street was doing nothing but dying, and back then I was doing nothing but not dying. These are thinner lines than we’d like to imagine, as if we could welcome a blown tire or flipping the car into a tall tree. There are ends all around us: Each drive is like a fish gasping for water—lessons not about how to turn the car, but how to brace for an unexpected impact and then drive through. Sometimes force is an ocean. Sometimes we call brutishness holy—treating death like a newborn child, crying. Throwing the car sideways is a path leading to confession; furious countersteer like the answer to every prayer.

It might be strange—I want to say it is

strange, the acrobatics a mind makes of memory

to grope at a shy feeling. Four men

are playing pickleball in the rain, after dark,

behind the bar I’m leaving. I see them

from far off, my eye strung through lunges

under yellow lights. I know without having

to approach—their taut chests; breath not quite

fogging air; the not-quite-cold

of the rain—how their hot skin burns

through wet cotton. Look how my body

shrinks against imaginary lust, wishing to pinch

hit for intimacy. Forgive this mix

of metaphors, of feelings. I don’t want to grip

a bicep or lick sweat from thick curls. When a ball

falls short, they say it’s in the kitchen. & I know

what that’s about, whiskey-whipped & single.

                                    I know, too,

what my mother would say

if she were here: Kate, you should ask

if they need someone to play in. Her utterance

a bright racket of lacerating care. My hips

rotund & low-slung as ever under laceless

underwear. & if I were braver I’d say

Ma, I’ve always been played in. I’d say

Ma, I’m tired of being the someone

everyone wants to play in.

Belly full of mac and cheese and soft serve ice cream,

my dad would take me down the halls of the mall

to the arcade

for our post-buffet tradition.

Cup of tokens from the counter

the table breathing to life from its pores,

timer and score counter lit up with the sound of the buzzer.

It was me vs. Dad-liath once again.

I’d clutch the striker with my small hand

ready to wreak upon my father a crushing defeat.

I felt unstoppable acting as forward, defense and goalie all at once,

sliding the plastic puck zig-zagging wall to wall with what felt like perfect precision,

over and over until time ran out.

I took a victory march around the video game machines.

On a player-abandoned screen I watched a muscley shirtless man

descend

down a stone pit to his death on a bed of nails.

Here in my present, I know he let me win.

I know that both the arcade and the buffet will close,

and that, in only a few years’ time, my dad’s tremors would begin.

I have learned that the strong and consistent will fall

And I will have to surpass them.

I will have to let them go like air.

I put the bread in the toaster. I put the toaster in the yard. I held my hand over your head and cured you of all of it, everything. But I didn’t think that one would work. We last spoke when my children came home, excited to share with us what they had learned at school: the man who invented Australian Rules Football once pooped for ten meters. You scoffed. But I believe them. I believe that there was a moment, in 1858, where an endless shit seemed possible – a whole crowd on the brink of seeing the infinite.

A black screen is accompanied by the drawn-out violin notes of a tango. The first camera shot pans across the red seats of the arena.  They are empty except for a few judges who are sitting up high and scribbling in notepads. A practice session is taking place. A half dozen teams move at top speed, arching their necks and flicking their legs to the tango’s accents. Their blades catch the light. The camera zooms in on a teenage Florence Pugh and Lucas Hedges. Their exhales release visibly in the cold air. Florence twizzles into Lucas’ arms. As she tosses herself into a dip, the golden hoop of her earring catches on a button of Lucas’ shirt, and her earlobe tears open. The camera angles toward the ice. A bright dot of blood splashes the surface. The tango music fades.

***

The camera cuts to a picturesque scene outside the arena: a town caressing a lake’s edge. A wide shot captures the same group of teenage skaters, but they are now walking along main street and wearing tank tops and shorts as though they are vacationers. The oldest boy pops into a convenience store. Another boy takes off his shirt, runs toward the water. A teenage Anya Taylor-Joy steps closer to Florence.  Her cupid’s bow looks how it always looks—perfect—like twin crescent moons. She tucks a wisp of hair behind Florence’s ear and reveals a tiny row of stitches.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You know how it is. This stuff happens.” Florence shrugs.

A bell chimes, and the convenience store door opens again. The oldest boy walks out, carrying a case of beer and a gallon of soap. The other boys cheer. Florence rolls her eyes.

The next morning, the fountain outside the arena overflows with soap bubbles: a summer snowdrift.

***

Florence and Lucas jog up and down the narrow hallways of the arena. Their coach walks by and pulls Lucas aside. The conversation is muffled, but from the way they both glance over, Florence knows Lucas and the coach are talking about her.

***

The tango music returns. Florence paces in her hotel room, speaking on the phone with her mom.

“It’s just a lot of pressure,” she says. Her voice cracks.

She notices movement outside and steps toward the window. A judge stands inches away from the glass, staring into her room.

***

Florence sits alone in the locker room. A florescent light buzzes overhead. When Florence removes her headphones, she hears a noise coming from a bathroom stall. The noise is someone vomiting into the toilet over and over.

***

Anya’s manicured nails help Florence into her costume. She pulls a zipper surrounded by rhinestones. Anya places a warm hand over Florence’s goosebumps.

“It’s freezing in here. You’d never know that it’s summer outside,” Anya whispers into Florence’s ear, allowing her lips to brush along the stitches.

***

The tango’s violin notes corkscrew into each other. Something in the melody sours. The camera cuts to a shot of the fountain outside the arena. Its liquid flows bloodred. The camera cuts to a shot of all nine judges lined up in the stands turning to stare directly at Florence. The camera cuts to a shot of the girls kneeling in a circle on the floor of the locker room as they carefully wipe down the edges of their blades. The camera cuts to a close-up shot of Anya twisting a tube of red lipstick. The camera cuts to a shot of Florence styling her hair in front of a mirror. Her reflection takes its hand and calmly grips the hot metal of a curling iron. Her reflection doesn’t flinch. The camera cuts to a nighttime shot of Florence in full make-up. She is wearing her costume. Her skates are laced up. She walks into the lake. The ripples catch moonlight.

***

The tango music stops.

The announcer tells Florence and Lucas to take the ice. The camera cuts to the pair. They arrange themselves into their starting pose at center ice.

The camera cuts out.

Derby Girl

Kate skates like she’s already had every bruise, 

scrape, or broken bone possible. Nothing

can hurt her. She zips through neighborhoods

with narrow streets and traffic; she goes down

big empty hills with her eyes closed. She listens

to the sound of her wheels on pavement and thinks 

about being small and new to skates again,

learning to place one wheeled foot

ahead of the other, like a fawn getting its legs

right. She likes it late at night when no one 

can see her, when she can sweat and whoop without 

an audience. One time she fell and knocked 

herself unconscious and when she tells this story

she leaves out the part where someone stole

her skates right off her feet and she walked 

home three miles in unmatched socks. 

The way she tells it is, she woke up in soft

roadside grass, looked at the sun, 

and vomited from a concussion.

At the Bowling Alley

I am the same as in real life—all or nothing. 

After a strike, the flash of a goofy cartoon pin 

across the scorekeeping screen. After a slow, 

sad drift into the unprotected gutter, 

taunts of an animated ball with arms 

and eyebrows. But I do feel cool. 

My shirt has a collar and tassels and dice 

embroidered on the lapel. He didn’t let me win. 

But when I am pulled into the arms 

of Player 1, we kiss in the near-quiet of the place— 

just us and the all-American pastime, 

the thump of balls on lanes and falling pins.

It's last August at my buddy Tom's place, and I've been sleeping on my alcoholic father's leather couch while visiting from New York, and the only way I can tolerate his presence and the near-constant reminders that he softened from a wife-beating drunkard into simply a hermetic one with a dead ex-wife is to, yes, drink all day, and so there's a medium-long exchange of questions about My Next Novel and Why Nobody Read The First One and, yeah, also The Crime Wave before we both produce bottles of Wild Turkey 101 and half-watch Twins baseball until a friend mercifully swoops me from the parking lot and offers their vape pen, which I decline because I’ve rebranded as Midwest Sober (i.e., can drink but can no longer do drugs), and this reminds the car-goers that I used to alternate between Actually Sober with Meetings and Sponsors and Working The Steps but now am Very Much Not Sober At All, and this, like, harshes the mellow (i.e., we get quiet while NPR drones about the largest single non-complex wildfire in recorded California history) and I’m no pyro-physicist but this seems Not Good so we feel worse and someone asks how the visit is going overall, and, well, y’know, in true Minnesotan fashion I can only respond: "It's going." From then on, everyone tries to avoid the Prodigal Son shit, and especially at Tom's since We’re Trying To Have Fun, and that's why someone yanks Cornhole from the garage, but nobody can do it, not really, I’m too visibly depressed and dandruff-ridden and sexless, and the awkward silences volley with pregnant pauses until it's all unforced errors and The National glitching on Bluetooth speakers as I plumb myself with another White Claw. My dad might not know how to ask seeing as he's a permanently disabled forklift operator who married a blind farmgirl, but my friends all went to college and so they sense my “writing life” is Sisyphean with less exercise, and that every Minnesota visit could be the last because I will presumably kill myself. But you can’t acknowledge that, not in daylight, so we slurp boozy seltzers and avoid politics or indie literature and toss frisbees then footballs then slap the boards across grass approximately 10 yards apart and split into two teams of two and stand beside the cornhole platforms and flip bags until we’re equal parts sloshed and sweaty. As drunken dullards with fluency in longform improv (i.e., joking without humor), the tosses start goofy: long-snapping, submarine-style, slowpitch softball, behind the back and between the legs Globetrotterish kinetic yes-anding, but pretty soon—like writing, like white-knuckling through oxycodone ER 80 mg cravings—you either get serious, or get dead, and whether it’s writing or building an Actually Sober Existence, I keep grinding toward the former when I really want the latter. Yet life and cornhole only proceed forward, so after a dozen more drinks and someone offering me ketamine (which I want to snort but decline), we slog through two games but gradually take the last one, well, seriously and reach match point, down 20-18, the third game, best of three, series tied 1-1. This is when the Cornhole Moment happens. See, bean bag toss is scored to 21 with “cancellation” scoring; this does not mean the bean bag has said something problematic and then writes a peevish New York Times op/ed, but instead means only one team wins a round of tosses. If you toss a bag into the hole, it is three points and if you toss a bag onto the board it is one point, so 20-18 is dire, especially if the other team has a bag flattened against the upper-left quadrant, which they do and there’s only one throw left, which there is, ergo we are (i.e., I am) about to lose unless I can dislodge that bag from the board and somehow also score three points.

This, like so much else, does not seem possible.  

Escaping suicide ideation is not the goal of pseudo-sports, but pseudo-sports (e.g., bag toss, beer pong, 8 Minute Abs, fetch) are a prime venue for escaping suicide ideation, and in this moment I am meditating on Cornhole Moment production like a Tibetan Buddhist meditates on death; the master Atisha is said to have told his students that if a person is unaware of mortality, their meditation will have little power, and I am fully aware of mortality in most waking (and many unwaking) moments insofar as my friends worry I will mortally wound myself, so this final toss sort of becomes a referendum on whether I should be alive or not. My inner light, or whatever, suggests that by stepping to the right of the board and opting for a parabolic helicoptering leftward slurve, I might knock the other team’s bag to the grass and maybe bounce my bag in for the game-winner.

So, I go with that.

I don’t know.

I was pretty drunk and extremely depressed.

As I corkscrew the bag and my arm extends and then flops like an elephant’s trunk, I sigh ‘till I’m lightheaded. Having botched everything else to simply feel non-suicidal, I’m now trying this: Cornhole. Fucking Cornhole. There’s plenty I could say and won’t about my own childhood cancer and poverty and mom dying young, but since the old man beat her into a brain bleed and the Subsequent Divorce of ’96, I’ve slogged through all these therapies—Art, Movement-Based, Movement-Based Art, Cognitive, Behavioral, Cognitive Behavioral, Acceptance and Commitment, Rejection and Ambivalence, Psychodynamic, role-playing that felt really weird and thus Psychodynamic, puppet-based role-playing that was somehow less weird but possibly still Psychodynamic, EMDR, puppet-based EMDR, relatively static but nonetheless Psychodynamic EMDR—but that’s only the clinico-psychological history because I’ve also tried 13 different anti-depressants on top of writing fiction with footnotes, writing fiction without footnotes, ripping off David Foster Wallace with and without footnotes, publishing sociopolitical autofiction that sold pretty well for an indie (but, thus, hardly sold at all), foreclosure, briefly living in my car and bathing at the library, moving from Minneapolis to New York City, attending the NYU MFA program, glugging a bottle of Old Crow daily the entire final semester, quite literally running out of money due to alcoholism and being a white-trash adjacent tenderfoot from the Midwest, moving from New York City back to Minneapolis, enduring eight months on my dad’s couch as a 27-year-old man, moving from Minneapolis to New York City again after lying on a job application and getting hired and working at a university, cocaine, mushrooms, acid, more cocaine, ketamine, fentanyl, various iterations of oxycodone and hydromorphone, heroin (twice), parasocial relationships, blunting how sad I am through long lists and irony, rubbing against the fourth wall, not rubbing against another person in about eight years, probably like 100,000 cans of beer, reminiscing about my college football days, more beer, reverting to jock-ish tendencies and less beer and seriously considering a tryout with the European League of Football as a defensive lineman for the Hamburg Sea Devils, submitting to various literary journals and online publications with mixed success, kiss-whiffing men at bars, having too many psychodynamic issues to facilitate romance with women, being vaguely bisexual but basically asexual, and finally just Going There in my work and admitting that I am jealous of strangers holding hands, of novelists with even small amounts of money or prestige, of NYU classmates with wealthy parents, of friends who have steady sex or maybe just occasional pleasure, of people who have diversified their Reasons To Live portfolio when I only have literary delusions and haven’t experienced meaning (i.e., a non-suicidal moment) since my beanbag floated with a slight wobble, rose to the tree line, dropped like a 12-6 curveball and smashed a corner of the other bag on the board, rippling it up and to the left as if slapping Jell-O while my friends and their partners and seemingly all the people I’d never be and lives I’d never live gasped and pointed and then hooted and hollered as it flopped into the weeds and my bag somersaulted into the hole, a winner, proof of concept, another moment where you’re alive and I’m alive and at least I’m writing it down.