Fight Song A Novel - By Joshua Mohr Page 0,1

midnight. No way to document any of the expiring minutes, but damn if they aren’t all disappearing.

A despicable truth about the human animal

Bob’s bike ride home that evening starts off much like the morning one. He is sweaty. Annoyed. He pedals past a billboard advertising Björn the Bereft, a magician/marriage counselor performing a few shows in town on his national tour. Coffen scowls at the billboard, knowing he and Jane will be catching the act this coming Friday. Actually, it didn’t sound like the kind of thing that Jane would want to do in the first place, but she had been so insistent, Coffen went along with it—of course he went along with it! Isn’t his fat ass oozed all over a bicycle seat because Jane wanted him to ride it, whip himself back into shape?

Coffen’s not on the bicycle by himself: There’s a corporate rucksack slung across his chest diagonally, the bandoleer of the working stiff. It pushes twenty pounds tonight because of the weighty plock.

He pedals and pants and perspires, turning onto a quiet stretch of residential road, riding in the bike lane, next to tall oleanders that line this street. His subdivision, his house, his wife, his kids, his computer and online life are only another half mile ahead.

Here’s where Coffen’s archenemy, Nicholas Schumann, pulls up next to Bob and his bike. Schumann slows his SUV, revs the engine, rolling down the passenger window so he can scream out at Coffen, “Shall we engage in a friendly test of masculine fortitude?”

Schumann is a douche of such a pungently competitive variety that he carries a picture of himself wearing his college football uniform in his wallet. And shows it to people. Bob will be huddled with the other dads of the subdivision at one barbecue or another and Schumann will whip out the photo and talk about how he single-handedly guided Purdue to an overtime win against the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame and how nobody thought they had a chance, but as the quarterback he had to keep his team focused, poised, grinding, etc., etc. All the neighborhood fathers hang on Schumann’s probably fabricated remixes from his glory days. He has these dads trained to sniff out Bob’s lack of interest in sports and has even said things in front of them like “Gentlemen, it appears that Coffen doesn’t enjoy the great American pastime of pigskin.”

They shake their astonished heads. Their eyes eyeing Bob like he pissed in the damn sangria.

“You really don’t like the pastime of pigskin?” the disgusted dads ask.

“Football’s fine,” says Bob.

“Football is like storming the beaches of Normandy,” Schumann says, the dads all nodding along. “It is a bunch of samurai let loose on the field to kill or be killed.”

“I give up,” Coffen mutters.

“That’s your problem,” says Schumann. “You can’t give up. Not when Notre Dame’s linebackers are blitzing your back side. Believe me, that’s a life lesson.”

Now, Coffen answers Schumann’s request for a duel of masculine fortitude by saying, “You wanna race me?”

“Psycho Schumann wants to rumble.”

“You have an unfair advantage.”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Schumann says. “I have about thirty advantages over you.”

The plock’s weight makes the bandoleer creep into Coffen’s skin. “I mean the SUV is your advantage.”

“I won’t go over seven miles an hour. Come on: Let’s see what you’re made of.”

It’s a despicable truth about the human animal that people often thrust themselves into the crosshairs of unwinnable equations. Logic is meaningless. Lessons learned get heaved from windows. All that life experience jets the coop with myopic majesty, and it’s here ye, here ye, gather round and take a gander as another dumb man makes a monkey out of himself.

Coffen’s particular monkey-ness on this particular evening lies with the plock and the self-hate at being honored for wasting ten years of his life on a job that does nothing productive or interesting, a job that shines the light on the fact that Bob himself has settled into curdling routine. Rationally, he knows he can’t beat Schumann—not piloting a bike while Schumann has a combustible engine—but Bob doesn’t care. He can’t care. There have been too many unwinnable contests in his life, and at this moment Coffen is hell-bent on seeing how he does against the Notre Dame pass rush, how he stacks up to what might be categorized as an insurmountable obstacle. Is he the kind of underdog that flouts expectations, or is Bob Coffen as miraculously pitiful as the subdivision fathers say?

So there Coffen is