The Book of Joe

the family. But I know he just likes to take the opportunity to feel noble. This is Brad, after all, my older brother by four years, who once sent me to the emergency room by jokingly bearing down on me in our father’s weather-beaten Grand Am soon after he’d gotten his driver’s license, as I stood innocently shooting hoops in our front yard. The car didn’t stop quite where he’d planned, and I ended up with a broken wrist and a separated shoulder, which wasn’t what I’d planned either. Later, he claimed that I’d darted out in front of the car without any
    warning. Whether or not my father believed him was irrelevant, because there was a big game against Fairfield the following night and Bush Falls was counting on Brad to lead the Cougars one game closer to a second state championship. My father would have thought it unseemly to punish the town hero.
    Meet the family.
    My mother, Linda, was a manic-depressive, diagnosed too late, who gracelessly killed herself by jumping into the Bush River Falls and drowning when I was twelve years old. I can sometimes remember her as she was before the onslaught of her insanity and the subsequent barrage of antidepressants that failed to ease the pain as they slowly choked the vitality out of her - a tall, soft-spoken woman with smiling eyes and an impish grin that always made you feel like you were in on some private joke together. When she kissed me good night, she called me Jo Jo Bear. Her laugh was infectious; her frequent tears a vexing mystery. Brad, my father, and I bobbed violently in the thrashing wake of her suicide, utterly incapable of relating to one another without her gentle feminine presence to corral us.
    Ultimately, Brad and my dad found a common ground in basketball. Brad was a star forward for the Bush Falls Cougars, and in Bush Falls you could aspire to nothing greater. He led the Cougars to two state championship titles, breaking a busload of scoring records along the way. He fucked many cheerleaders. That was pretty much all there was to Brad back then, fucking and basketball. Not bad work if you could get it. But I couldn’t, and thus Brad could not relate to me but simply viewed me with a mixture of bemused pity and disdain. As far as I was concerned, Brad was a moron, shallow and one-dimensional, and I wanted nothing more than to be him. My father, Arthur, had been a somewhat less spectacular player for the Cougars himself, and he never missed one of Brad’s games, home or away. Afterward, they would discuss plays, relive highlights, and watch the UConn games.
    If it isn’t painfully obvious yet, I never made the team.
    Our tragically diminished household had no use for an increasingly cynical kid with a spastic crossover dribble and no outside shot, and I grew to despise the exclusive nature of their devotion to the Cougars and all things basketball. The question of who was responsible for setting in motion this cycle of alienation and resentment is your classic chicken-orthe-egg conundrum, but either way the gulf between us continued to widen, and if my father ever attempted the daredevil feat of crossing it, his efforts were so minuscule as to be invisible from my side of the chasm. Brad was awarded an athletic scholarship to the University of Connecticut and left for college the same year I entered Bush Falls High as a freshman, leaving my father and me alone to fill the inexorable silence that gripped our house in a stranglehold.
    I never planned on going back to Bush Falls; that much is obvious. Otherwise, I never would have written a novel that trashed everyone there so thoroughly. The truth is, though, I never actually believed I’d get it published. So I wrote a book about my hometown, about Carly and Sammy and Wayne and the terrible events of my senior year, liberated by the notion that it would never see the light of day. Then Owen Hobbs called me one evening and told me that it was “fucking brilliant.” Not too many people can pull off using expressions like that. Owen can, because Owen is fucking brilliant.
    Statistically speaking, it’s damn near impossible to write a best-seller. It’s also remarkably difficult to piss off an entire town. Overachiever that I am, I managed to accomplish both feats in one fell swoop. When it comes to alienation, I’m something of a prodigy.
    So I never planned on going back to Bush Falls. But I never planned on my father having a massive stroke, either, as he played in his Senior Alumni