In a break from the irregular content of this blog, we’re delighted to bring you an extract from the first chapter of Every Novel by an American White Dude, the upcoming debut of Jackson Johnson.
Told in taut, gripping prose, Johnson’s novel tautly weaves together the disparate elements of one white dude’s gripping life with the greater American themes of American greatness –– The New York Book of Reviews
This year’s entry for Great American Novel of the Year, Johnson’s Every Novel by an American White Dude, reexamines the exigencies and crises of life in 21st century America with an unrelenting eye for detail that nonetheless relentlessly connects those dots into a bigger picture, taking in our shared obsession with cars, TV, baseball, casual racism and baseball –– Baseball Quarterly
Chapter I, A Formative Experience I Had Involving Baseball
Sunlight beat down hard on the baseball pitch or field, whatever it’s called. It touched the spectators in the stands, reddening the skin of the middle aged men shifting uneasily in plastic seats, trying to avoid dripping ketchup drips on to their pants. It shone, too, on the players, reflecting from helmets of the guys who wear helmets, the throwing guy, I guess, or maybe it’s the hitter, and also from the sweat-lined faces of the other guys. The sun reached also casual fingers between the bleachers, lighting random patches of decades of baseball-related crud, mainly ticket stubs and peanut shells. The sun touched it all, except the stuff in the shade, lighting the whole arena or stadium with a light that was familiar for all that it was unearthly, literally.
The Dodgems were playing the Stickers in the final playoff before the series started for good, reigniting an ancient rivalry that dated back to when both teams had been minor players in the major leagues. Both hailing from New Providential, Short Peninsular, an homestead of tall pine trees and hazy mountains, they’d within a year both moved to new cities, but without relinquising their smalltown sensibilities and ancient rivalries.
Sat high up in the stands, Jonson Jackson, who is this totally different guy from the guy that I am, supped flat, plastic-flavored beer from a small cup. He’d long since lost track of whatever was happening on the court, letting the atmosphere wash over him instead: the hot dog smells, the bad beer, the sun again, the whelming dudeness of it all. As a smaller dude, he’d been a dedicated fan of the Dodgems, diligently listening to every game on a small portable television with a smashed screen that he’d traded for a toothpick with Dale McSchmidt, a friend of his from kindergarten who will never be mentioned again.
He was nudged out of his reverie by longtime colleague, sometime friend, Chad ‘Chip’ O’Chet, a seventeen-time divorcé now on to the twelfth Mrs O’Chet for the third time, although it was in fact Ms, she being a feminist scholar focusing on Mexican tapioca, or something, a stunning, 5’14” brunette whose one unappealling feature – the fact that she was extravagantly cross-eyed – made her only more attractive, the obvious flaw serving merely to highlight her beautiful figure, skin and hair, and personality, I guess. Chad, holding three hotdogs in each fist and a beer cup half full of beer in his mouth, gestured loosely in a way that clearly meant, Would you like one of my six hotdogs? I’d say something but my mouth’s full of pig meat, a gesture that Jackson appreciated all the more, coming as it did from a fellow dude, a rare breaking down of the masculine walls every American man builds around ourselves, rising in serried rows, like a baseball track.
Despite a self-imposed ban on eating pig anus, imposed by my then-wife, Midge, I relented and accepted a sweaty hot dog from Chip’s massive, bearlike paw as he settled into the seat next to mine. He looked up at the scoreboard.
‘Whoo-ee, twelve strikes up in the seventh down, looks like your boys are going home, JJ’, he said, pleasantly, but with a looming threat of sudden inexplicable death, using the nickname Jackson has on account of the fact that his initials are JJ.
‘They could still turn it around’, remarked the third man in our party, a quiet, bookish man whose name I couldn’t remember, although he was one of my oldest friends. Unlike the massive Chep, this other guy, let’s call him Florence, made me uneasy for a reasons I could never quite articulate, yet with a curious sense of protectiveness, as though he were a small female houseplant entrusted into my care by an elderly neighbor.
‘Remember the 1959 off-season quarterfinals?’ Florence went on, ‘Sticks came back from eight batters down in the twenty-first inning, when Sugar Jon Sporman hit a homerun off the batstop. Greatest game I ever heard’, he added, leaning back dreamingly in his chair and slopping beer down his paisley shirt.
Remember? How could I forget? That was the question. I closed my eyes and breathed evenly, preparing myself for what would inevitably come next.
‘You heard it’, said Chat, who’s black, by the way, leaning around me to look Florence in the eye and pointing at me with a slightly crushed hotdog, something I somehow knew even with my eyes closed, ‘He was there, man!’
Florence turned wide-eyed to me, ‘You were there?’
There I was.
Frank Podmore 