#MeAsWell, a Novel by Peter Mehlman

Author:Peter Mehlman [Mehlman, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950154104
Publisher: The Sager Group
Published: 2019-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

The Next Day

At 6:10, Pepper’s ancient clock radio broadcasts the urgent voices of WTOP Radio. News, sports, and weather. He wants no part of all three but is too tired to argue.

He hears the name “Trea Turner,” who either hit a game-winning double, stole three bases, or made a game-losing error. Pepper is too foggy to focus, slipping in and out of half-sleep. Only a screeching ad for an auto parts store jolts him to full consciousness. He flicks off the radio and thinks about a recent column he’d written about Turner after the Nationals shortstop was in pregame tears, owning up to and apologizing for tweets from his college years at NC State featuring both racist and homophobic slurs, with some added shots at the mentally disabled.

Turner was the third MLB player in July to have offensive posts from his feckless past come back to haunt him. When Josh Hader took the mound in Milwaukee just days after a trove of his racist posts turned up, much of the Brewers’ crowd gave him a standing ovation. Jesus. If he’d murdered a few black guys, he’d have probably gotten the key to the city.

Pepper had interviewed Turner a few times about trivial baseball stuff—as opposed to interviewing the lead-off hitter about the pros and cons of third world debt relief—and had the general impression of a nice, friendly, fun-loving kid who runs really fast. When it came time to write about Turner’s Tweets, Pepper had felt stuck. What can you say about an instance encompassing so much of what’s disastrous about America? A middle-class kid from a nice family in a neighborhood of Florida where he was surrounded by aged liberal Jews spends three years in college and yet somehow the flesh-eating plague of Twitter entices his thumbs into bashing gays and Down syndrome kids. Pepper remembers when he was fourteen, his father telling him “Don’t pick on the fags. Deciding to live like that? They have it tough enough.” His father died of a massive coronary in ‘88, too soon to see gays trying to get married and fight in our unwinnable wars. If he’d held on to see all that, Pepper imagines him saying, “Marriage? The military? I don’t get the appeal, but if that’s what they want, fine.” Now we’ve got America’s youth throwing around all their ignorant enlightenment. Hopeless, Pepper had thought, when he sat down to write the column about Turner. How could he, a fairly intelligent, two-legged mammal, write 1,500 words of cogent wisdom about how viciously deranged we are?

He wound up writing a column devoted to reminding everyone that when we talk about professional athletes, we are talking about children, forgivable children, who drop a pass or miss a shot and call their moms in Wichita in the middle of the night, crying their eyes out. And yet, we grow up admiring athletes as gods and never get over it. Including himself in this syndrome, he wrote about how, in the middle of

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