With and Without Class

by David Fleming

  A grizzled old hag answered. “Hello, International Stooley Registration.”

  “Yah… in the competition, you just measure how big they is?”

  “We measure the competitor’s stool-weight in ounces. Heftiest wins. It’s that simple buck-o.”

  “I makes ‘em big.”

  “How big?” she inquired, dubiously.

  “You’ll see.” And he hung up the phone right there, merely providing the courtesy of letting them know he was coming.

  The single elimination tournament was a grueling fourteen-day undertaking. Each day an Offering was made to the twenty-person judging panel and the ranks of the original four-hundred competitors were thinned considerably. The amount of people that came to see the competition seemed a little strange at first. But people had always worshiped each other for strange reasons, reasons that got stranger all the time. Reality TV celebrities by the dozens, vapid runway models, heiresses and socialites: they all had the ear of the press and the public.

  It was all a little intense for most, but not Roy. He’d always eaten as much as he could. Food hated him, refused to stay with him, like oil and water. But he loved food and it was all free. He first met Dr. Vickers in the contestant’s cafeteria. The Doctor sat by himself as usual.

  “Anyone sitting here, mister?” Roy asked.

  “Clearly there isn’t. And it’s doctor.”

  Roy sat. “What you a doctor in?”

  The doctor stopped worrying and masticating a barbeque chicken leg and slapped his hand to a thin aluminum box about the size of a TV remote with buttons. He eyed Roy suspiciously, “Quantum Mechanics. You won’t steal my invention!”

  “What’s a Quantum for?”

  “Oh, you know. Possibilities. Maybe an electron’s here, maybe it’s over there. Maybe your brain is normal and healthy like the rest of us or maybe, perhaps my boy, it’s full of marmalade, about to burst, owing to the pressure.”

  “Hey, jerk. I just wanted to talk to you. Ain’t my fault you some freak that sits by hisself every damn day.”

  “You won’t defeat me, boy. I’ve watched you advancing through the rounds, watched you like a spider that spins his web and waits. I’ve won the Stooley seven years in a row. And you won’t stand between my rightful place in history. You haven’t the stomach nor the girth. It’s a sport of kings, you see, and I’m sorry.”

  *

  In the finals Roy was pitted against Dr. Vickers. Both competitors were assigned opposing blue stalls within the amphitheater. Dr. Vickers had emerged a half-hour earlier, weighing in at a confident 565 ounces—a world record. He relaxed in the waiting room, getting a neck massage, posturing, chatting-up reporters. But his eyes flicked occasionally to the TV screen with its image of Roy’s sweat-beaded forehead and that look in his eyes like Roy was going somewhere—somewhere—yes—perhaps never returning.

  But Roy emerged from the booth two hours later, pale and disheveled. Vickers pushed his huge bulk through loiterers and spectators back toward the stage. Cameras zoomed in on Roy’s floating birth, projecting it to the huge panoramic grid of screens for the capacity crowd’s eager inspection.

  “We’re getting the weight,” the announcer said. “Hold on. It’s coming. 569. 569!”

  The crowd cheered. Vickers stopped and hung his head.

  “We have ourselves a new International Champion!” the announcer said.

  “Hold on,” another announcer said. “Zoom in on it. Zoom in, damnit. Zoom! There. There! It’s—it’s Abe Lincoln. You see. That top hat. That chin, the eyes. The eyes, man! My God! It’s him… It’s him.”

  “My God!”

  That alone wouldn’t have been enough. No. There was a predestined culmination. Roy stood, tired, swaying, head swimming, he said into his microphone, scanning the oceanic crowd of hushed faces, with such deadpan, such poise, “For score—seven plops ago.” The crowd blazed laughter. And a new star blazed there on that stage. The commissioner rushed the stage and extended with straining arms the Stooley to him. Both men raised the platinum sculpture of a man perched atop a toilet with sculpted chin resting in a tiny hand’s palm—a look of stoic grace in the statue’s chiseled silver features.

  Roy knew then he had something. Not a gift or calling but a talent. And it was more than he’d ever asked. No one could take his talent from him. But that didn’t stop some scientists from trying. They claimed the 569-ouncer was impossible for a man his size. They said he had to of brought matter with him into the stall, kept it warm in a tube strapped to his leg—long-legging they called it. These allegations were, of course… bullshit.

  The public adored him. He didn’t train, he didn’t strive or yearn. He wasn’t in-shape or intelligent or passionate. But he was exceptional. The fact couldn’t be contested. He was pure and he was simple. He dropped his pants and did what he was born to do. It was abundantly clear for the first time in history that absolutely anybody could have it all and for no apparent reason. Kids looked up to Roy. Standardized test scores dropped. Parents encouraged their kids to eat like Roy. Graduation rates faltered.

  And the endorsements rolled in for Roy. But Roy refused to change his diet, to eat what the science of the sport prescribed. With the fiber-switching and the starches, the purge/binge cycles. He let the companies of the foods he already ate sponsor him. With checks rolling in he could afford to move out of the mobile homes. But he’d grown comfortable. So he bought-out all the residents and had the modules connected in a chain. A coiling chain that from aerial view some said looked just like, well, you know.

  Dr. Vickers dropped out of the competitor’s circuit after his defeat and Roy won the Stooley year-after-year. So much so that some wondered if he should even bother to let the platinum statue leave his palace of coiling mobile units.

  Roy worked his way into the mainstream of pop culture a little at a time. Television discussion panels invited him on for the simple comedic juxtaposition of him sitting amidst veteran journalists and political pundits. While discussing the nuclear proliferation of Second-World countries within the context of an unregulated information age, Roy chimed in, “Reckon if President just close his eyes and sticks to his business, everything comes out fine.” The tone of discussion never recovered. The show was cancelled to make room for one about torturing friends for money.

  Roy looked back over his seven-year career and realized he had amassed considerable wealth. He had sufficient funds so that he could sail himself, his entourage and his band of well-wishers comfortably through retirement. This would be his final International Stooley Tournament. Win or lose he would pass the Stooley on to the next generation of feasting competitors. In the weeks prior to the competition, he went about his business fairly calmly, confident in his decision, when the telephone rang.

  “Hello,” Roy said.

  “I made one bigger than you this morning.”

  Roy cringed. “Who this is?”

  “I made one bigger than you this morning, as I have every morning. You fool, did you think the spider had stopped spinning his web.” The phone clicked. Roy thought to check his caller ID, but he knew who it was. Dr. Vickers had come out of retirement for one last fight.

  Roy paid a member of his entourage to pose as a journalist. The false journalist hid among a cluster of reporters waiting outside the amphitheatre during the commencement ceremony. When Dr. Vickers arrived in his limousine and walked up the red carpet, this spy pushed past the others to ask, “Dr. Vickers! Dr. Vickers! Is it true you came out of retirement for the soul purpose of exacting revenge on Roy?”

  Vickers brushed his way through the bustling reporters undaunted.

  “Dr. Vickers!”

  “My dear lad, I don’t get caught up in the politics. I came here to poop.”

  The spy reported back to Roy. Roy glanced up in a daze before hurling his champagne flute against the wall and pulling his ruby embroidered bathrobe close. “Damnit!” The pedicurist looked down. “
That Doctor’s up to something! He never believed it were real. He never believed in Honest-Abe.” He rubbed his hands over his temples, “I—I just can’t think.” Well-wishers encircled with back-patting and flattery.

  But at the competition, the Doctor was eliminated in the third round. Still Roy was not appeased. He had his people try to follow Vickers but it was as if he had vanished.

  Roy advanced through the tournament as expected—virtually uncontested. In the finals he sat in his stall beside an Italian opponent of greatly inferior skill.

  “Well,” the announcer began, “Do you think we’ll see another Honest-Abe out of Roy tonight.”

  “No. I fear we’ll never witness sportsmanship of that caliber again. You know… wait a second. What’s happening with Roy?”

  “That’s the look. He gets it right before he wins each Stooley.”

  “No. It’s something else.”

  A woman in the crowd stood and screamed, “He’s dying!”

  Roy’s face twitched. He groaned and slumped over before the final plop. A plop echoing over loudspeakers through the silent amphitheater that faded to the sound of Dr. Vickers as he clapped slowly, walking up the empty center aisle. Vickers reached the stage and snatched an idle hand microphone. “Good evening,” he addressed the mute crowd. “I say again, good evening. Has it been so long, my friends, that you don’t recognize your own, Dr. Vickers? Very well, your beloved Roy has died of aneurism. A failing common to the profession. We can add a lack of staying power to his list of crimes, the greatest of which being the forgery of his talents. Roy never birthed Honest-Abe. This is a matter of fact. And this other remaining competitor isn’t a shadow of what I was in my prime.” He scanned over the crowd.

  The sound rose up slowly from somewhere in the nosebleed seats, like a soft thrumming, “Roy. Roy. Roy,” growing—reaching its way to the stage.

  “And yet you loved him. Despite his false prowess. You stupid, stupid lemmings. No man that size could make something like that.”

  “ROY! ROY! ROY! ROY!”

  Security guards in gray shirts encircled the stage, encroaching on the doctor.

  “Ah, but wait!” the doctor’s eyes flashed bravado, “Wait and see what, with your blessing, I propose.” The doctor stepped toward the center table where the platinum statue rested. His eyes grew. “Simply give me back my prize. And all—all is forgiven.” Guards rushed him, restrained him as his open hands strained toward the stoic face of the gleaming man atop his stool.

  “ROY! ROY! ROY!” The crowd stood, pumping arms to the ceiling.

  The doctor lurched forward and a guard strangled around his thigh. “Roy, you… you long-legging, imposter-ing son-of-a-bitch.”

  An elderly woman in the front rows jeered him. He retorted, “You wouldn’t know talent if it sat on your own stool!”

  Novel Sample:

  Growing up Wired

  by

  David Wallace Fleming

  As a diversion, I followed the Can Man around campus—always from a safe distance because he was shy. Was he John the Baptist incarnate? It was too soon to know, though he wore a waist-long, unkempt gray beard with black striations and the bees loved him, buzzing near, hovering for the sugary remnants on his tan arthritic fingers and those gooey flecks inside the cans of the clear garbage sack slung over his shoulder.

  He listlessly pedaled his forest-green, 1970s ten-speed over sidewalks and jarringly wobbled up a curb with a “shit-SHIT!” bursting as if a lethal sneeze. He rambled, to himself and perhaps unseen past enemies, friends, lovers—of song remnants married to dimming emotions—the dueling nonsense maxims of God and Satan. His desert might have been one of loneliness among tight-skinned twenty-one-year-olds with his crumbly, green flip flops serving as thong sandals and dime-store, twelve-year-old clothes his camel-hair robe.

  It’s unclear why I followed the Can Man. I had presumed him alcoholic and schizophrenic. I imagined him pressed flat against the lowest strata, the weight of our riches and comfort pinning him fast as the water in a lightless ocean trench crushes a man from the vertical miles resting above.

  Hindsight is 20/20. It seems obvious with the passage of years that I followed the Can Man because I believed him alcoholic and with three men on my father’s side suffering from this I needed to know this Can Man was a different species from what I was, that a twitch of destiny could never shove me in his place.

  He came early in the mornings around seven-thirty, so I had to set my alarm to catch him. It was still a week before the start of the fall semester. The prior evening I had drunk beer on the patio and I was hung-over as I dressed and slipped on shower sandals. I sat on a wooden bench next to a stone tablet of our fraternal crest. The patio was scattered with aluminum cans and glass beer bottles. There were maybe fifty of them. The Can Man would come.

  He was a creeper, that Can Man. Like a house fly on your arm before you knew it. I startled as I looked up from my daydreaming to him picking up the cans set along the long wooden bench like parapets. He worked solemnly, though he mumbled, “Devil” with each crumpled can he threw in his clear sack and “Saint-ey”, lisping childishly as he poured stale beer out of full ones. “Devil, Devil, Saint-ey,” his gaunt face froze and then tilted on his thin neck, fingers infrequently tugging at ring-tabs and sliding over aluminum as a blind man reads brail.

  “Hey, Can Man,” I exclaimed.

  He looked up—right at me, but without malice, setting a can down before picking up his bike to sneak away. He did this with such fluidity, such a smooth and eloquent escape that I wasn’t able to protest. The alcohol left undigested after my sleep had made me bold yet too dumb to get him to stay. It was a week before we had enough drinking guests over to warrant another Can Man visit.

  This morning there were only twenty or so cans and bottles. So I went downstairs to a room we called the Pit-Pit because it was vaguely connected to the Pit through the TV room. This was where the pledges stored their cans and bottles that they would use to fund a charter bus trip to visit another fraternity at some other campus of their choice. I went down there to steal a bag full of cans and bottles. It was a heavy, rattling bag. It would draw in the Can Man. As I neared the stairwell I met a pledge, the pledge-class president, no less.

  “Hey!” he said. “What do you think you’re doing with our cans?”

  “They’re not just your cans,” I said. “I bought some of these cans.”

  “You can’t do that. If you take them, I’m going to tell Rex.” (Our fraternal president).

  I set the bag down. “Look. I need these.” I looked up at the ceiling tiles and reached into my wallet. “I’ll just pay for them.” I handed him a twenty, hating myself because all I had on me were two twenties.

  “I retract my former statement.” He picked up his basket and continued on to the laundry room.

  The extra cans and bottles were scattered around the porch quickly so no one saw and in random places to look natural. I waited on the bench. His bicycle made a slight squeak that I had trained my ears to hear. When I heard his I looked down at the red bricks, trying to be inconspicuous as he considered whether to begin collecting. Cans rattled and rustled into his plastic sack as I looked down. “Saint-ey.” Beer poured and his footsteps paced bricks, “Devil. Devil.”

  I stood. “Excuse me, sir.” I walked toward him.

  He looked up, heading toward his bike. “I don’t want your cans.”

  “No, please. I’d like to talk with you.”

  His hand motioned to push me away. “Proper channels. Proper channels,” he said.

  “What? What proper channels?” I asked, nearing him.

  “Call your governor. We’ll have a man out in twelve minutes or it’s free?”

  “What’s free?” I asked.

  He looked around, upset. “Everything! Everything, man, don’t you know that? It’s free.” He spoke loud with a lisping apostle’s rage. He looked up to the sky. Then
raised a crushed beer can and showed the decay in his smile, “Why do you throw it away?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Actually, I’d like very much for you to have these cans.”

  The Can Man picked a can off the ground. “I’ve been picking up for you kids for one hundred years.” He looked up at me. “It’s time. Go into the world. Get a job!”

  I followed at a distance as he walked to a carnation planter with beer cans covering its oak rim. He stooped down before the planter and picked a can crushed into a disk off the red bricks. “You see that? That’s a Big Nic. Nickel got too big. Carry her back to my spot; flip her for a nickel that spends.” He scrounged over the cans on the rim. “Devil, Devil,” he poured beer, “Some Saint-ey in this here.”

  As a breeze moved past him, green horse manure and burning leaves flashed to mind with the fear of confronting someone so dazed and inhuman settling in my throat. “Where do you sleep?” I asked.

  “World.”

  “What?” I asked.

  He didn’t look up. “World. I sleep at the world, the outside part.”

  “Oh.” I scratched my head. “Where was that again?”

  “Under rocks. Specs of sand—inside them; I do. The sleepy brains of strong-fisted police marble-ers. Up the butt of that beagle. And the crawlspace of public libraries. Sometimes I sleep also, there.”

  “What are you doing to prepare for the future?”

  “Future?” he asked.

  “It’s what happens next.”

  “Ah. No. I, I don’t think so,” his voice wavered and softened, “It don’t happen next.”

  “Well, actually it does. Like earlier we talked about something and now we’re talking about something different. Time passed between that. Take that and extend it out to a really large scale. That’s the future.”