Buddy Cooper Finds a Way: A Novel - Softcover

Connelly, Neil O'Boyle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743274164 ISBN 13: 9780743274166

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

When you lose for a living, it's pretty hard to fail.

Once, like all of us, Buddy dreamt of success. He and his wife, Alix, had just bought a new place, not too far from the beach. Their daughter, Brook, was out of the hospital. And the fans were cheering him on as the Invincible Man, one of the rising stars of the Southeastern Wrestling Confederacy.

Then everything fell apart. An argument over Monday Night Football somehow crossed the line, Alix kicked him out, and Buddy moved in to the Motel 6. After that, winning just didn't seem right, so he traded in his golden cape for a latex mask and became one of the anonymous losers that fans love to hate. Every few weeks, he'd get a new mask, rechristen himself, and step into the ring to get beat all over again -- as the Grave Digger or the Widow Maker, the Deadbeat Dad or the Unknown Kentucky Terror. In the four years since the divorce, his record is 0-186, but that's okay by Buddy.

Free of mad notions like happiness and success, he pops pink pills to control his rage and copes with his insomnia by watching John Wayne westerns and QVC. He has his job, his apartment, his truck, his once-a-week visits with Brook. Life as a failure isn't that bad, or so he's convinced himself.

But now in an effort to boost pay-per-view ratings, Buddy's boss threatens a shake-up. As part of the plan, Buddy will have to end his safe days as a professional loser. He's actually slated to win a match. What he'll learn, though, is that like all new scripts, this one comes with its own cast and complications: a phone psychic living in fear, an alien-abductee with the secret to salvation, a championship match interrupted by a violent fanatic, what could be faith healings, and perhaps the most unlikely miracle of all -- a second chance to believe.

A touching and wonderfully unpredictable literary debut about a professional loser who's forced into a rematch with life, Buddy Cooper Finds a Way announces the arrival of a fresh and original voice in American fiction.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Neil O’Boyle Connelly, well-acquainted with losing from his days as a high school wrestler in Allentown, Pennsylvania, teaches fiction in the M.F.A. program at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

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Chapter The First

In Which Our Hero Attempts to Return Home. Trophies and Medals. A Perfect Record. The Therapeutic Value of Giving Up. Churches Without Roofs. Wishing for a Script.

Just as I'm nearing the turn that will lead to safety, the second moon appears before me, hung low over the Cape Fear River at the end of Market Street. I pretend I don't see it, look left, and steer my Ford into the alley. Up ahead I can make out the yellow light on my deck, and I'm almost bold enough to hope for the impossible: Today's plan might work. A crackling A.M. voice from WAOK reports that the evening will be clear, mild temperatures, no rain -- news I instantly take as omen. This will end up as just one more fine day in a life that's fine. On the seat next to me sits a box of Domino's pizza and two rented videos: The Green Berets and True Grit. From here on out, the plan is simple: get up off the street, bolt the door, unplug the phone, forget the moon, and spend the night in a world where things make sense. It won't be like last year.

I pull to the side of the alley, kill the headlights, and turn the key, bringing silence and calm. I loop the strap of my gym bag over my shoulder and grab the pizza and flicks. From the floor I pick up the final element for tonight's mission -- a two-liter bottle of ginger ale, which doesn't remind me at all of champagne or the tink of forks off glasses. This morning I dumped a six-pack of Bud Light into my kitchen sink, transforming my apartment into the alcohol-free zone it's supposed to be these days.

Taking the steps that lead up to my apartment's deck one at a time, I envision the comfort of the brown couch, the security of the remote control in my hand. As I climb, I'm aware of the urge to turn and face downtown, peek at the second moon haunting the sky. Of course it's not the second moon that bothers me, it's what I can't help picturing in its shadow: Alix, taking risks she doesn't need to for money she already has.

So I focus my eyes down at the faded wood of the steps that lift to the faded wood of my deck. The yellow lightbulb illuminates the Map-of-the-World welcome mat I apparently ordered from QVC in a drunken haze. $29.95 plus shipping and handling. I step up to my door, one foot in the Atlantic and one crushing China. On top of the world.

Hugging the soda inside one arm, balancing the pizza and tapes, I dig for my keys in my pocket. Five seconds from the vault, I sense movement to my right and turn. The fact that it's just Dr. Winston in my hammock barely registers before my eyes leap to his feet and the golden, knee-high sneakers. I drop the pizza box, which flips once and splats. John Wayne clatters to the ground.

Dr. Winston swings free of the dirty white netting and steps into the yellow light. "Dr. Cooper," he says. "We'd almost given you up for dead." He shakes my hand, a practice he insists on every time we meet. His shaggy black hair, knotted with dirt, drapes his bearded face as he checks out the upside-down pizza box. I'm staring down too, but my eyes lock on the boot-length gold sneakers I haven't seen in four years. On the sides are tiny black horns I painted myself, though now they look like little dark wings.

"I don't believe it," I say.

"Indeed. The generosity of my fellow citizens gives me great hope." His teeth, though straight, are the color of mustard.

"Goodwill?" I ask.

"Second Chances," Dr. Winston corrects me, naming the homeless shelter four blocks east. They accept donations from the public, recycle them to needy folks like Dr. Winston. I picture Trevor, climbing into the attic on Asgard Lane, ripping open the dozen cardboard boxes I double-sealed with packing tape. But this doesn't bother me. I have the life I want.

"Is that pepperoni?" comes down from above, and I look up into the grinning face of Dr. Gladstone, on all fours leaning over the rain gutter. He's wearing the battered baseball cap Alix gave me when Brook was born that reads WORLD'S #1 DAD.

"Pepperoni and sausage," I tell him.

Gladstone drops off the roof and studies the upside-down box, then flips it over. Melted cheese stretches from the cardboard lid. "This is completely salvageable," he decides.

Dr. Winston lifts his chin. "Dr. Cooper, we need your help to join the information age."

"We're gonna watch TV," Dr. Gladstone beams, peeling free a limp slice. "Remember Welcome Back, Kotter? Happy Days?"

I step back a few feet, scan the roof for the third member of the Brain Trust. Dr. Bacchus's rounded form leans onto my chimney, one hand gripping the 1950s-era antenna bolted to the brick. He looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy silhouetted against the deep cobalt blue of the June sky. "There's no way this will bring in the premium porno channels," Dr. Bacchus reports.

Gladstone giggles nervously. All this time I'm concentrating on ignoring Winston's boots. I focus on where I am and say, "You need more than an antenna to get a clear picture." My logic sounds like bad Bob Dylan.

"Already taken care of," Winston announces, bending into the darkness beneath the hammock. He stands up holding the black-and-white twelve-inch Sony that Alix and I bought when she was working on her master's thesis at UNCW. I take it from him, hold it in my hands like a sacred artifact. In the mornings before she left for class, while I spooned Brook breakfast, Alix would turn on Cardiac-Attack and kickbox aerobically. Or aerobically kickbox. I never could figure. Like the boots, like the baseball cap, this TV belongs enshrined in an attic uptown. Some nights, with Brook barely asleep in the bedroom crib, with Letterman smiling at us from this very screen, Alix and I would make love on the couch.

"Ancient history," I say. "It can't still work."

"Believe it," Winston says. "The altar's got juice. We discovered a live outlet in Jesus's feet."

Overhead, Gladstone nods. "It's a miracle. Like on Touched by an Angel."

I glance across the alley at the Salvation Station of the Holy Redeemer, formerly Most Precious Suffering of Christ the Genuine. The city's been threatening demolition since Hurricane Fran collapsed the roof and the near wall. But the other three walls survive, and the rickety steeple still stands, stretching for heaven. Above the steeple now, the true moon rolls on its back. I cannot see its false twin from here, blocked by trees and downtown buildings, but I'm angry at myself for being tempted.

I turn back to Winston, hand him the TV before it explodes in my hands. He says, "We'd hoped you might consider donating your antenna."

"Our cause is just," Dr. Bacchus shouts, still at the chimney. "Plus it's tax-deductible."

"Take it," I tell them. "I got cable." Forty-four dollars a month for soap operas and late-night anesthesia. "There was a cape with those boots," I say to Winston. "A golden cape."

"Sure thing," Dr. Bacchus says, now at the roof's edge. "Had a black cow on it."

"It was a bull," I explain.

With a full mouth, Dr. Gladstone mumbles, "One of the Princess Street crew got it."

"How did you know about the cape?" Winston wants to know. But I don't answer. For a moment my mind gets away from me, and I imagine driving to Second Chances, finding the table where volunteers have set out the relics of my former life alongside broken blenders and board games with missing pieces. I shake these images from my head. My life is a fine one.

When Dr. Bacchus jumps down onto the deck, the whole thing rattles. His hair is combed, his face clean. He may shower at the shelter. Bacchus hunches over with Gladstone for a sloppy slice. "Flippin' bolts are rusted shut. And that steel is old school -- the real deal." He stands with the droopy piece of pizza and chucks my shoulder. "So you got a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743274164
• ISBN 13: 9780743274166
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 300
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; AA Utrecht; 3584; Niederlande