Coming into the End Zone Read Online Free Page A

money and subscriptions, to the kitchen and put them into a plastic sack together with the book containers which, opened, seem to have swelled to twice their original size. Tomorrow I will carry the lumpy, swollen sack down the back steps, across the garden, into the carriage house and place it in a can, to be put outside the garage on the proper pickup days.
    To what end this useless, expensive effort for the publishers, and then for me? I have to dispose of matter I did not send for, do not want, and resent because it tires me to dispose of it.
    David Macauley wrote and illustrated a wonderful book called Motel of the Mysteries , a spoof on the Tutankhamen discoveries. It supposes that our North American civilization, due to a reduction in third-and fourth-class postal rates, is suddenly buried and destroyed under the weight of pollutum literatum . Massive amounts of paper harden into rock, and our civilization is lost to human history for a thousand years.
    Carrying the discarded mail from front door to kitchen to garden to pails in the garage, to the alley, I can believe this will happen here. We will all soon be similarly buried and petrified under our junk mail. It will take the discovery of ‘a series of writings attributed to the late-twentieth-century Franco-Italian traveler Guido Michelin’ (to quote Macauley) to explain how it all happened. Lovely book.
    A bad night. I thought of Bill Whitehead and Robert Ferro dead and gone. I wondered how death had seemed to them at the moment of its arrival. I dreamed about the pains of dying. Does it hurt? I seemed to be asking my mother, as if I were a child again and she would know about such things.
    When I woke at four, I remembered a poem I once could recite: ‘Thanatopsis.’ William Cullen Bryant’s idea was that death was pleasant, like a dreamless sleep, of which, upon awakening, one says: ‘It was my best night’s sleep.’ At five I was still awake, having decided that the poem eliminated one consoling certainty. Only if one was sure one would wake after the deep, unbroken sleep would one lie down fearlessly. Just so for death.
    With that, I was afraid to go back to sleep, got up and made coffee and waited in the living room until I heard the Times bounce up on our iron steps.
    I meet my neighbor across the alley while I am putting out the garbage. He is in his bathrobe and has lost a lot of weight. I don’t know his name after almost four years of proximity, and my ignorance has gone on so long it is too late to ask him. We refer to him as Mr. Lone Star, the name of the restaurant he once owned, a topless lunch establishment by day, a gay bar at night. We assume he is gay; under my workroom window on weekends young men, their radios turned up to loud, hard rock, wash their cars, or his boat, or his van. On occasion in the spring, he drives a motorcycle that he revs up and then roars out of his garage.
    Although once on familiar terms, despite my ignorance of his name—he no doubt is ignorant of ours—we now say little to each other. It is an aborted acquaintance which never developed because none of us made an effort. Now, I eye his shrunken waistline and diminished stomach, and wonder: Can he be sick? And then I reproach myself: Not everyone who loses weight is sick, although at times, in my despair, it appears to be so. My association with Bill and Robert and Michael, and now Richard, makes me suspect the terrible affliction in everyone I see who looks thinner. Like evil: Because we know it to be within us, we then think it must inhabit everyone else.
    This afternoon is my time to tape for the radio. The job I have had for a number of years is a strange one for me, a print devotee. Out of a month’s reading, I choose four books I have liked, and write a short review for each, to be broadcast on National Public Radio on the morning news program.
    To write these reviews is an exercise in brevity, even painful compression.