hit by a car the night before her final exam. How do you compete with that? But he did, and he won, by sheer exhausting persistence. In everything he did: Bump against him in the street, and he would pursue you even if you tried ignoring him: Hey! Motherfucker! Apologize for that right now! I'm talking to you! Or playing racquetball, grunting and throwing himself against the spotless trans-parent back wall, leaving sweat marks there, screaming at every perceived mishit, smashing racquets into the tiled floor, every point another opportunity to grasp perfection or failure. He even convinced me to have our son, and he is a very good boy, I admit he was right, he was always right. Except when he complained about the fucking Fascist pedestrians in this town, how they would dawdle across intersections and hold up traffic. People should drive faster, clip a few of them, just to teach them, he snapped, and
 | | leaned on his horn, leaned on it. This is where I made my stand, and I said, very quietly, The day a pedestrian runs over a car driver, that's when you get to complain. And that must have broken something in his head, because he just gaped at me, and shortly after that he told me he was getting off his Paxil, because it didn't make him feel right, And I want to be the real me again. And I said to him: But what if the real you is an asshole? But it was too late, he had infected me, or maybe more accurately, he reintroduced me to a part of myself, this habit of telling people what to do, pushing and provoking, obsessing about what next, what now. I have always been one to intentionally overdo it, scrabble at greatness so hard that it eludes me, but at least I have my excuse: I tried as hard as I could … I would attempt to learn guitar, but it would soon devolve into me slashing at the strings, gripping the fretboard like a lifeline, the tips of my fingers
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