The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online Page B

somewhere else, but I wouldn’t do it. A teammate pulled me aside and told me we’d get revenge later. We’d put something slimy in the guy’s bed at night. I wouldn’t do it. I purposely placed myself smack in front of the thug every play. Every play, he came barreling into me, hell bent on destruction. Crying, bleeding, drooling blood, I went back to the line. I made the thug run over me again and then again. I made him elbow me again in my streaked and grimy face. I made him kick me when I was down again and then I got up for the next play, and, again, I lined up in front of him.
    I wore him out. I wore him down to the level of his conscience, even his. Toward the end of the game, he stopped throwing elbows. He stopped knocking me over. Finally, he started to avoid me , to move his position, and to run around me whenever he could. When I’d plant myself in front of him, he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He’d attack the guy next to me or he’d go after the ball carrier as he was supposed to. When the game was over, he approached me. He squeezed my shoulder with his hand. He told me I was a tough little guy. I sneered at him. I didn’t care what he thought. I despised him. But I felt I’d beaten him in the only way I could.
    It was because of my dreams. It was because I was a hero in my daydreams, and I wanted to be what I pretended to be. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” as the poet Yeats said, and the responsibility not to fall short of my own illusions weighed on me constantly. My fantastic self-image rode on my shoulders, a burden that only added to my general feeling of dread. It is not fun to get punched. It is the opposite of fun. When you have been punched, you do not want to be punched again, not ever. I haven’t been in a fistfight for more than forty years, and yet people who have been in fistfights, people who have punched people and been punched, read the fight scenes in my novels and say to me, “You’ve been in fistfights too. You’ve punched people and have been punched too.” It’s not an experience you forget. The fights and the threat of fighting and the appointments to fight and waiting to keep the appointments—all of it was a source of anxiety for me. And to escape that anxiety, I dreamed.
    I dreamed away long hours of every day. At night in bed, before I went to sleep, I would review my collection of completed dreams, the ones that didn’t need any more work, the ones that made sense and were ready to be imagined. I would picture a strip of movie film, complete with sprockets. I would picture it running frame by frame through a viewer, the sort of hand-cranked viewer my dad had in his basement darkroom. On each frame of the film strip there would be a picture of a dream, a different picture, a different dream on each—atom man, boy genius, cowboy, whatever. I would select one and close my eyes and the story would begin to play out in my mind. The dream would soothe me and relax me like reading a book until finally I could sleep.
    All that dreaming and making dreams: it was good practice for a someday novelist, I guess, especially a novelist of adventure and suspense. But it wasn’t a very healthy way to spend a boyhood. Even I knew that, or came to realize it after a while. I was dreaming more and more and becoming less and less aware of the reality around me. I was seven or eight years old, and I was losing the knack for direct experience. I could feel the tactile sense of the world’s immediacy slipping from my fingertips. I could see the light of the present moment dimming into darkness.
    If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road , the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty , television series like Mad Men : in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of