Knockout Read Free Page A

finished my stint at rehab, I moved back home with my father. He’d been an insurance salesman, but he’d recently retired. Now, for a hobby, he taught archery to poor kids. Last summer, when I’d been on drugs, he shot me in the thigh withan arrow. I remember that he was trying to teach me some lesson about life. It must not have been very profound, because I could not remember what it was. All I remembered now was the sound of that arrow entering my thigh. It went ffffffftttt. Maybe that was the only lesson that he was trying to teach me. That an arrow entering into your thigh goes ffffffftttt.
    I still hung out with Tommy a few nights a week. My father would not allow him inside our house though. He said Tommy reminded him of the all the bad stuff that I’d ever done. Like that time I totaled his Buick as I drove to the pawnshop to sell his coin collection. Or that time I accidentally pitchforked that duck that sometimes waddled into our backyard looking for bread crusts.
    â€œTommy and I are keeping each other clean,” I explained. “In rehab, everyone had fake spiders crawling on them, but Tommy and I had fake ants crawling all over us. We bonded over that shit.” “He’ll let you down,” my dad said, loading a bunch of arrows into a quiver to take down to the community center. “Or you’ll let him down. Letting people down is the only thing you two really have in common.”
    Even after a couple months of staying sober, my father wouldn’t accept Tommy as my friend. One night when Tommy picked me up, my dad ran outside and shot an arrow in the driver-side door of his truck. I apologized to Tommy, but he waved me off.
    â€œPeople have shot arrows at me before,” Tommy said, “and they probably will again.”
    L ately Tommy and I hung out down by the river. We’d gotten tired of going to the zoo long ago, and the time we’d tried to pick up women at the local pet store by knocking out those chinchillas had been an absolute disaster. Instead of going to AA meetings, we wrestled on the banks of the river to see which one of uscould knock the other one out. Once when I knocked Tommy out I pulled down his pants and wrote the word “Jackass” across his ass cheeks in black marker, and the next time he knocked me out he wrote the word “Dummy” on mine. This continued on for the next couple of months, back and forth, sometimes one of us drawing a very funny and detailed picture on the other’s butt cheeks or writing a few sentences about our state of mind. Each time I got knocked out I went home and pulled down my pants and pondered Tommy’s writings or his cartoons in my bathroom mirror and I thought about how hilarious this whole situation was and how good it was to finally find someone who liked the same things I did. It was great to finally be able to communicate some of my struggles with another human being and also have something interesting they thought be written on my body a few days later. Tommy’s writings and cartoons were often very poignant and thoughtful. I really wished my father could see this side of him.
    â€œWe’re not going to wrestle tonight,” Tommy said one night when he picked me up. “We’ve got a job to do.”
    â€œWhat job?” I asked.
    Tommy usually drove with his knees so he could gesture with his hands while he talked. Now he turned toward me and slapped me on the shoulder. At first I thought he was trying to knock me out, but this was just a regular, friendly shoulder slap.
    â€œWe’re going to steal a tiger and then sell him to this guy I know,” he told me.
    T ommy turned down a driveway and I saw a small house behind a thin stand of trees. He shut off his headlights but kept the car creeping up the driveway.
    â€œThis is it,” Tommy said. “The guy keeps a tiger in a cage in his backyard, but he doesn’t feed it enough. It’s a totally