The Book of Joe

one miserable son of a bitch looking for someone to blame.”
    I nod again and attempt a sardonic grin, but I can feel it coming out wrong, my facial muscles all out of whack, reflecting frayed nerves instead of confident wit. “You’ll understand if I don’t ask you for a blurb on my next book jacket.”
    “You’re an asshole, Goffman.”
    “Well, it’s always a pleasure to hear from my readers,” I say, searching desperately through the sea of umbrellas for Carly to come rescue me.
    “I’m an asshole too,” Dugan says. He produces a cigar from his jacket pocket and lights it with a gold butane lighter that bears the embossed logo of the Cougars. The lighter is not standard issue, but clearly a gift, and I find myself idly wondering what other Cougar paraphernalia Dugan has accumulated over the years: neckties, shirts, pocket watches, gold pens. He blows out a few puffs, and we both watch the smoke float out from under the shelter of his umbrella and fade quickly like a ghost between the raindrops. “Nothing wrong with being an asshole as long as you do it responsibly.”
    “So I’m doing it wrong?”
    “You wrote a lot of shit in that book to cut me down personally.” Dugan looks right into me, daring me to contradict him.
    I shrug. “If the shoe fits ... ”
    He grimaces, an expression somewhere between a grin and a sneer, nodding as if to say he’d expected as much. “I’m not going to say you weren’t right about some of the things you said. But the problem was, you threw in all that other perverted crap and character assassination, and whatever truth you might have had there was buried under it. If you’d just written it straight, people might have been able to accept what you had to say. But you showed no respect, so you just pissed everyone off and you lost your credibility.” Dugan takes a deep breath, and to my immense surprise, I see his jaw trembling. “Not a day goes by that I don’t regret the way I handled Wayne’s situation,” he says. “I didn’t think I was doing something wrong at the time, but that’s no excuse. One of my boys was in trouble, and I let him down. It took me a while to understand that, but I know it now.”
    A fat lot of good that does now, I think angrily, but don’t say it. Anything I say at this point will come out wrong, or it will come out too right, and either way it will blow up in my face. So I just look up at him, trying to discern from his expression what this conversation is truly about.
    “When he came back to town, sick like he was, I couldn’t shake the notion that somehow, in some way, I might be to blame, that if I’d handled it differently back then ... ”
    Dugan’s voice trails off and, impossible as it seems, he appears to be fighting back tears. “Wayne must have hated me for a long time. But I guess dying slow gives you time to think things through, and he decided that he didn’t want to leave this world looking back in anger, so he forgave me. I’ve been teaching basketball for going on fifty years. When you teach anything for that long, you get so used to teaching, you kind of forget how to learn. But I’m going to learn something from Wayne’s death, and that is that holding on to anger is a waste of fucking time. It’s a waste of life.”
    Now there are actual tears in his eyes. After all these years, Dugan and I are sharing an Oprah moment. Later, I know I’ll come up with a million things I would have liked to say, things that would have assuaged various aspects of the anger and guilt I’ve been harboring protectively for all these years, but the only part of me that seems to be operational for this historic meeting are the muscles in my neck that enable me to nod.
    “Anyway,” Dugan says, clearing his throat and looking over my shoulder, “I’ll tell you the same thing I told your father. We make mistakes. They don’t make us. If they did, we’d all be royally fucked, especially a couple of assholes like us.”
    I grin at his last remark, and finally find some words to say, even though I’m not sure I possess the conciliatory feelings to match my tone. “You could learn a lot from an asshole.”
    Dugan smiles at that, and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him do it. “I guess so.”
    I watch him walk away, still chomping on his cigar. From behind, his age is considerably more apparent, in the stoop of his posture and the sag of his crumbling shoulders under his basketball jacket. Later, I’ll