Social Blunders Read Online Free PDF Page A

scientists studying defective frontal lobes in white mothers. An editor at the New Yorker rejected the story with a personal note saying I lacked subtlety.
    “Is anyone working on getting her out?” I asked.
    ‘‘Maurey won’t lift a finger—says a woman who threatens dogs deserves prison. Pud and I performed a ghost dance last night.”
    “I mean bail. Lawyers. Reality.”
    Hank made a deep chuckle sound. He and Lydia have been a couple for twenty years, a relationship held together by Hank taking whatever Lydia says or does as humor.
    “They’d let her out on her own recognizance,” Hank said, “but she won’t go.”
    “Because Thoreau refused to leave jail?”
    “Because the women’s cell has a black-and-white TV and the men’s is color. Lydia organized a sisters hunger strike for equality.”
    Here’s a problem I could deal with. There are so few, I like to jump on them when I can. “Look, Hank, call Sheriff Potter, tell him I’ll donate a color TV to the women’s cell.”
    “Lydia will claim you cheated.”
    “For God’s sake, don’t tell her.”

4
    I telephoned Dyn-o-Mite Novelty Co. and ordered a custom bumper sticker that read As God is my witness, I’ll never be monogamous again . Then I extracted Wanda’s Dodge Dart from the garage full of golf carts. Wanda took my Datsun 240Z. She said I owed it to her.
    “It’s the least you can do after everything I gave up to support your vapid dreams the last fourteen months,” she said.
    “What did you give up?”
    Wanda tossed me a look of intense pity and sped off into the Carolina humidity.
    I drove the Dart up Wendover Avenue through a high school parking lot to an open-ended football stadium where boys in full uniforms and helmets were running steps. Football practice is what I do whenever I’m worked up over life. I sit at the top of the bleachers and imagine the players raping Lydia. I choose five typical teenage boys and picture them on top of her, behind her, in her mouth. I picture them urinating on her nude body.
    The coach stood at the bottom, wearing gym shorts and a cast on his left arm, shouting epithets of failure at the players. I got the idea they’d lost a game the night before and had been sentenced to a Saturday afternoon of running up and down the stadium stairs. The coach called the boys “girls,” meaning it as an insult.
    A fat kid dripping sweat missed a step going up and fell, barking the holy hell out of his shin. He rolled on his back in intense pain, then sat on a wooden bleacher seat and looked glumly down at his bleeding leg.
    The coach threw a wall-eyed hissy fit. Charged up the steps and got right in the kid’s face guard and screamed at the top of his lungs.
    “You stupid homosexual pussy!” the coach screamed. “You pitiful excuse for whale shit!”
    The kid didn’t react. Just sat there looking at his leg. If I’d been the fat kid I would have pushed the coach backward down the stairs and broken his other arm.
    The coach slapped him. “Look at me when I talk!”
    “Hey,” I said. I was sitting twenty feet or so away, atop the bleachers. “That’s no way to treat a human.”
    The coach stared up at me. “This is none of your business.”
    “Touch the kid again and I’ll make it my business.”
    Now the kid was staring like I was a Martian.
    The coach’s face wrinkled up. “Are you in administration?”
    “I’m in humanity and you’re impolite. You’re an ape.”
    The fat kid made it upright. “Don’t call my dad an ape.”
    “Your dad?”
    “He yells because I deserve it.”
    My eyes passed between the two. There was a nasal resemblance. “You’re his father?” I asked.
    The coach beamed with pride. “I don’t show no favoritism.”
    ***
    A funeral procession blocked the intersection at Battleground Avenue, so I turned off my engine and waited. The cars were all big, new, and American, except for a couple of Mercedes being driven by women. I have a religious belief that dead