Between Wrecks (34 page)

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/20
^th
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 Columbus 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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