Don't Make Me Stop Now

by Michael Parker

  I told Larry, Look, fine, we don’t have to go home right yet, but I’m not going to cart you around if you are planning on doing more drinking. He said the stores were all closed now anyway, and besides he had a better idea. He said he wanted to do a brick.

  A brick is a training session where you stack one discipline atop another with only a short, race-simulation transition: bike–run usually but sometimes a swim–bike.

  “Tomorrow?”

  Larry said, “No, tonight. Right damn now.”

  I laughed — an actual laugh, sincere, for what he said was funny despite his drunkenness. I told him, You’re kidding right? I said, You’ve been drinking, you’re dehydrated, it’s the middle of the night, I just got off my bike, I rode eighty miles. I said there were a dozen other reasons why this was a bad idea.

  “Come on, Ironman,” said Larry. “You can do it.”

  I know what I can and cannot do. And for the most part — a staggering 98 percent of the time — I stop myself from doing what I know I can’t — should not — do. Those things I know will lead to pain — mine and other people’s — I don’t do anymore. I no longer take pleasure in making myself feel bad, no longer seek out pain to feel alive. But as they say in those basements, it’s progress, not perfection. Every time I heard that phrase I would look over at old Clapton, expecting him to demand perfection. But he never contradicted whoever was rationalizing their failure with a version of those words I trafficked in nigh hourly for years: I tried. Seemed to me failure was sanctioned in cases where maximum effort was expended to try and do right. And then, as they said, you simply did the next right thing.

  It was not difficult to spin Larry’s challenge into what would be the next right thing for him to do. He needed to sweat out the booze, work out his rage. He needed to redeem himself in Barbara’s eyes. She would be thankful I’d steered him clear of more Miller High Life.

  I said, “How are you going to get your gear out of the house without waking everyone?”

  I was not looking at Larry by then because I did not want to see him — his competitive leer, or worse, the supercilious smirk suggesting he knew something about me that I did not know, or want to know, myself.

  “I keep everything in the shed,” he said.

  As soon as I agreed to the brick, implicitly I suppose, by asking about his gear, guilt set in. I staved it off with logistics: Where would we swim? We’d have to wait until daylight to ride. It made no sense and I said so, but Larry had answers. We’d jump the fence at the city pool — he and his buddies had been doing it since they were in junior high, they’d never been caught — and there was enough moon out to keep us safe on the traffic-less country roads surrounding our town.

  “Where are we riding?” I asked.

  “Shull’s Mill.”

  Shull’s Mill was the hilliest, curviest training ride within fifty miles. I always avoided it unless I was feeling particularly masochistic. Larry claimed he did hill repeats out there, though you couldn’t tell it by his legs.

  “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said as I pulled into the alley behind our houses.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “You seem like you got something to prove.” I turned the engine off, but neither of us made a move to get out.

  “And you don’t?”

  I allowed myself to look at him then, because he’d pissed me off.

  “No, Larry. I don’t have a damn thing to prove by pulling a brick in the middle of the night with my drunk neighbor I just bailed out of jail. Don’t have anything to gain by it either.”

  “Never known you to turn down a chance to train.”

  “You’ve never gotten hammered, slapped one of your kids around, gotten yourself in and out of jail, and come over to the house in the middle of the night asking me to do a brick with you after I rode eighty miles, either.”

  I knew I’d gone too far judging by the silence, which was of the stunned variety, like the quiet a small child suffers after a particularly hard fall.

  Larry said finally, in a creaky register that suggested near tears, “I thought it would be good for me. Like, you know, get all this out of my system. You know I really look up to you, Patrick. I seen how you worked yourself out of the same damn hole I’m in just by training.”

  The same damn hole as Larry? I thought of the outdoor shower, of how today was the day to finally reclaim it. How wonderful it would feel to come home at daybreak after a hard workout and stand there in the rising sun, serenaded by bird chirp and the baritone thrum of trucks out on the highway. It seemed I had the chance to get beyond things, that one fairly easy workout lay between me and some place that I’d been swimming, cycling, and running toward since she left.

  “A training brick, right? Not a race.”

  Larry said, “What kind of race would it be, shape I’m in? Talk about your level playing field.”

  There was no such thing — we both knew that — which was partly why we disliked each other so much.

  In the kitchen, filling water bottles, I glanced at the bulletin board where I had pinned race schedules, my training logs, and my times for last season’s races, which arrived in the mail on a sheet entitled “Results for Novice Males.” Once Larry, having followed me inside, spent an uncomfortably long time studying my training logs (I recorded everything there — times, distances, interval reps, average speed, intensity, average heart rate), and said, pointing to the heading on my official race results, “Why don’t you at least snip off that part?”

  Because wielding a pair of scissors will not transform me into an Elite Male, I wanted to say. Instead I believe I shrugged.

  We’d agreed to meet in the alley behind our houses. I loaded my gear into the back of my Cherokee and waited for Larry. Lights went on in what I knew to be his kitchen. I braced myself for shouts. In a few minutes, Larry came out dressed in a Speedo and a bike jersey, a backpack slung over his shoulder. He met me five minutes later, pushing his bike out of the shed.

  “I thought you said your gear was in the shed.”

  “You were spying on me?”

  “Was Barbara up?”

  “Didn’t want her to worry. I told her about your plan.”

  “My plan?”

  “Relax. She thinks you hung the damn moon. Lawyer and all. If I tell her you think a workout’s what I need she’ll swear on the Bible it’s the only way. If I was to tell her it was my idea, she’d be calling the law before I could get my tires pumped up.”

  I don’t know why I was always second-guessing my neighbor’s motives, when for years I excused my own mistakes with a phrase: I wasn’t thinking. Most of the time the phrase should have read, I wasn’t thinking of anyone but myself. Everything Larry did, however — especially last night — seemed designed to put me in an awkward position. Telling Barbara this brick was my idea seemed insurance should something awful happen.

  Driving to the pool, Larry’s beery breath filled the car, reminding me of the high likelihood that something awful could happen. There is no worse odor than booze fumes seeping from the pores of someone sweating out a drunk. I breathed through my mouth to escape it, rolled down the windows to let in the heavy, humid air.

  We did not talk, did not even whine, as triathletes often do before a hard workout, about lack of training, injuries, bad diet decisions — those reasons we cultivate to excuse poor performance. Silently we set up our transition area by the car, just outside the cyclone fence we’d have to jump. We were going over the cycling route when Larry mentioned the run.

  “Run? Isn’t that a little ambitious?”

  “Not for you, Ironman.”

  “Swim–bike seems plenty given the circumstances.”

  “Let’s say I got a lot to prove.”

  I didn’t care for the sound of this. But I stripped to my bike shorts, grabbed my goggles, and struggled over the fence, knowing that I’d feel better once the swim started.

  The water felt preternaturally warm, amnioti
c almost. Debris from the storm — leaves, sticks, trash — floated on the surface. Nevertheless I did feel better once submerged. Of the three disciplines, swimming is probably my favorite, for I feel the least amount of self-consciousness in the water. This isn’t to say that I’m particularly fast. I’m usually in the top third of the Novice Males, which means that in a race I’m swimming by myself or alongside a couple of others. But Larry drafted behind me for the entire one thousand yards. I felt strong in the water, fluid and relaxed, and after five hundred yards I accelerated to lose him, but he kept in my wake, his hands brushing my feet every few strokes. He’d veer off at the wall, but as soon as I emerged from my flip there he’d be, hard behind me. I could not shake him.

  He was into his bike shoes and helmet before I was. Surely his quickest transition ever; I was sipping water, wiping my feet with a hand towel, and Larry was running for his bike. We did not speak at all — well, I did, said something about his swim, complimented him on keeping up with me, but he only huffed, obviously winded, and applied himself to transition.

  I let him go. I’d catch up with him when Shull’s Mill lifted itself in lazy lariat curls from the flats along the river, rising and tightening its hairpins until the grade was upward of 18 percent, when I’d resort to the granniest of bottom-ring granny gears, the lactic acid beginning its icy burn through my calves and quads.

  And this is exactly where I caught him, on the first hard climb. He was standing up on his pedals, weaving wildly; I stayed seated, dropped my heels, slid back in the saddle, concentrated on spinning a decent cadence, blew past him on the penultimate switchback. That seemed the end of the evening. He would not even attempt the run; I looked back at him, took note of his wobbling, his upper body thrown over the headset, his pedal stroke deteriorating into desperate chops. He’d spent everything in the water. Keeping up with me was killing him.

  This is not a race, I reminded myself as I settled into the climb, struggling quite a bit actually, and why the hell not? I’d ridden eighty miles, had no sleep, it was just light enough out to see five feet in front of me, no way of avoiding potholes, gravel, debris from the storm. It hit me how dangerous this was around the time that Larry, out of the saddle again, his thick legs pistoning, his breathing echoing through the hollow, whooshed past me on the final hairpin.

  Again I let him go. Obviously he needed this more than I did. I am at a place in my life where I don’t need to win, as my unapologetically Novice status attests. Didn’t I let my brothers cart me off in a rental car to the clinic without protest? Didn’t I let she-who-shall-remain-nameless take off with her younger man? Larry would have behaved badly in both situations, would have denied, protested, fought, ended up in jail.

  As he shot out of sight I remembered the time I let him talk me into joining a group ride organized by the local bike shop. He argued that it would be good for us, make us faster, improve our bike-handling skills, and because I’m a nice guy I caved. But triathlon cycling is time-trialing — you aren’t allowed to draft, you must pass in fifteen seconds or risk penalty — and the few times I rode with the group, I longed to be riding alone, slung out over my aerobars, tucked in against the wind instead of anxiously monitoring the rear wheel of the cyclist six inches in front of me. Despite what Larry thinks, we are not in this together.

  The descent on Shull’s Mill is tricky in broad day, but at night, after a storm has shaken loose the overhanging canopy, well, we had no business there. I knew that well before I saw Larry hit some blown-down object in the curve ahead, I knew it before I ever trained with the man, the first time he engaged me in his over-the-fence bravado.

  He went down on his right side, the bike dragging sideways beneath him. Larry and bike came to rest on the lip of the ditch. When I got to him his teeth were chattering, though it was muggy out and we had both soaked our jerseys with sweat on the climb.

  I checked his helmet, which did not appear to be cracked, took note of the road rash raw and beading with droplets of blood on his arm and leg.

  Helping him out of his shoes, I asked him what hurt.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  I reached for his left shoulder and he drew back his arm; the other one, the right, the one he fell on, hung loose and useless at his side.

  “Go on,” he said. “Get back on your bike.”

  “It’s your collarbone?”

  “Don’t worry about me. Worry about the clock.”

  “I’ll go get help,” I said. Grimacing, he asked for his water bottle. I gave him mine. He’d brought only one, as usual. He was never prepared.

  I left him there, hammered the mostly downhill five miles back to town. There was a convenience store near the city limits that stayed open all night long, and I’d planned on stopping there, but when I rounded the bend and saw the store, lit by yellow fluorescence and neon beer and cigarette signs, I kept on going. The most appealing thing about triathlon is the fact that you have three separate disciplines, each with its own set of skills. If you do poorly in the water, you can prove yourself on the bike; if you blow the bike, and can get into your stride within the first mile, you can make up lost time on the run. In this way it is not at all like real life, which seems to me filled with single chances, repetitive mistakes, junk mileage.

  I suppose this was what I was thinking when I wheeled into the parking lot of the community pool, hopped off my bike, stripped off my helmet and bike shoes, struggled into my Asics and took off running.

  Later I would claim, simply, I wasn’t thinking. But this was not true at all. As I ran, I was conscious of the life I had ahead of me, of how, considering the mess I’d made of things up to that moment, it was far better for me to err on the side of endurance. I was thinking about how insincere and hurtful it is for me to pretend to be there for people I don’t much care for. I was raised to be nice to people, but nice isn’t always what people need.

  Leaving Larry by the side of the road felt awkward and unnatural, like trying to run right off the bike always feels. But in time my stride lengthened, my breathing eased, and I felt good enough to settle into my race and concentrate on the next mile, and the one beyond that, until I knew I could not only finish, but finish strong.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2007 by Michael Parker. All rights reserved.

  Stories in this collection originally appeared in the following publications: “What Happens Next” and “Muddy Water, Turn to Wine” in Epoch; “Hidden Meanings, Treatment of Time, Supreme Irony, and Life Experiences in the Song ‘Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman’” and “The Golden Era of Heartbreak” in The Oxford American; “Everything Was Paid For” and “Off Island” in Five Points; “Go Ugly Early” in The South Carolina Review; “I Will Clean Your Attic” in The Literary Review; “The Right to Remain” in The Idaho Review; “Smoke from Chester Leading Me Down to See Dogman” in Black Warrior Review; “Results for Novice Males” in Backwards City Review.

  “The Golden Era of Heartbreak” also appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005. “Off Island” also appeared in Pushcart Prize XXVII and New Stories from the South 2003. “Hidden Meanings, Treatment of Time, Supreme Irony, and Life Experiences in the Song ‘Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman’” also appeared in New Stories from the South 2005.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

  E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-217-0

  A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL PARKER

  This i
s your first story collection in more than a decade. Why did these take the form of stories instead of a novel?

  I’d written some of these stories, over the past ten years, before I had the idea to collect them. It just turned out that they shared thematic ideas. Or maybe it didn’t just “turn out.” Some writers argue that you don’t choose your subject matter — it chooses you. I wrote several novels in the last decade, and all of these novels had in common at least some of the subject matter that the stories have. Everything I write seems to touch on the notion of love, what it means, how that meaning shifts, how we negotiate its currents. But I never thought of turning these stories into a novel, because they came to me as story ideas, and I’m hard-pressed for story ideas. When I get one, I sit down and roll with it. I’m scared it’s going to get gone if I don’t.

  Do you see yourself in a particular lineage of writers? Since you’re from the South, you’re in the shadow of writers like Faulkner and O’Connor. Though you love these writers, do you ever want to tell people to quit asking the question?

  Well, if I was so ungrateful as to tell people which questions they can and can’t ask, I guess I’d have to tell you not to ask me this question. The only reason I find it difficult is that once you’ve been asked a question a few hundred times, whatever comes out of your mouth in answer seems overly scripted, artificial. I’m always trying to find a new way to answer the question, which is dumb, because I feel about it now the same way I did when I was first asked it twenty years ago. I do love many Southern writers, but I don’t read them exclusively, and when I sit down to work, I’m not thinking of them or my connection to them. I have in mind a character and a situation, and that’s all. The landscape of my work is 90 percent Southern because that’s the landscape I know well. I don’t have to make it up. I have to make it fit the desires and shifting needs of the characters, but I don’t have to create it out of thin air. I think reviewers that mention it are mostly not from the South. The reviews I get from Southern publications just talk about the people — usually how messed up they are. People want categories. They want to say that this book is like that book, this band is like that band. That’s why I’m so fond of the movie Spring Break Shark Attack. It’s absolutely beyond comparison, and not in a good way, though you have to admit the title is brilliant.