The Shocker Review: How I Chose My EPL Team

Hannah arrived at the Irish pub ten entire minutes early, but Johnny Dog Man was already there, taking a leisurely pinky-in-the-air pull from a tall glass of what she supposed was vodka or gin. He stood up from his table when he saw her approach, and then unfurled a smile, a cheery scimitar of straight grey teeth.

“You must be Hannah!”

“I am. And you’re Johnny Dog Man.”

They hugged strangely. He was very tall and sharp. They took their seats. Her chair wobbled under her. A waiter limped over with a little notepad. Hannah ordered a whiskey sour and a club sandwich. Johnny Dog Man asked the waiter several intense, probing questions about the prime rib. Then he ordered the prime rib. As the waiter left, Hannah decided it was up to her to take the initiative and seize this conversation by the throat.

“So, Dog Man. Is that a family name?”

This made him laugh. Johnny Dog Man’s cackle reminded Hannah of a black-and-white gangster making his last stand with his trusty Tommy Gun. Eventually, his gunfire laughs spent, he explained that his actual surname was Wolfman, but that he didn’t care for wolves (too wild and very much overrated) and was instead known far and wide for his love of dogs-all sorts of dogs even you know, the little piece of shit dogs!-and thus he was born again as Johnny the Dog Man which over the years was whittled down to Johnny Dog Man. Hannah nodded at this barrage of words, unsure of what to say. It seemed to her that not knowing what to say would be an ongoing issue with this man, but he was picking up the tab, so she’d bear it.

“Do you have any dogs?” Johnny Dog Man asked, narrowing his eyes at her.

“No, but there’s a raccoon that hangs around our garbage that kind of barks like a dog,” Hannah said, “What about you? Do you have any dogs?”

“No.”

“But you love dogs! That’s the main thing I know about you!”

“Yes. I love dogs. They’re fucking amazing.” Johnny Dog Man then flagged down a different waiter to ask for two more Gin and Tonics (for himself) and to tell him that he really loved dogs.

He was a very thin man, was Johnny Dog Man. When he shifted too quickly his bones snapped and cracked. Jutting from his salmon colored neck was a long pointy head, on which was attached a gaunt face with deep-set jittery eyes that had at some point clearly seen some shit. Spindly arms, stork legs, brittle hairless wrists, the man had no body fat to speak of. And yet, for all that specific physical strangeness, Hannah couldn’t put an age to him. He could have been twenty-eight or forty-six. She decided she would look for clues.

Johnny Dog Man took a noisy slurp of his tall Gin and Tonic and said, “So, first things first, I want you to know that I wasn’t bullshitting you, Hannah. Bullshitters thrive in my line of work. I am not one of them. I’m a huge fan of your writing, so pardon me if I seem nervous. I’m truly, madly, deeply honored that you agreed to meet with me and let me pitch you my little scheme.”

“Of course,” Hannah said, already attempting to piece together what exactly the scheme could possibly be, “Honestly, I’m surprised you even know my name.”

Not many did, in a professional capacity at least. Hannah was a writer, though when people asked about this she would naturally demur and find a way to minimize her minor accomplishments. She had published one novel, a very thinly veiled autobiographical number about a quirky yet fractured family getting together for an ill-advised family reunion in the picaresque town of Waterloo, Iowa, where black secrets were revealed amongst a backdrop of sinister cornfields, populated by Midwestern grotesques. It was called Memoirs of the Dirt. The finished work barely hit two-hundred pages, but it had taken her five years and four drafts and had more or less turned her into an alcoholic. Nonetheless, thanks to luck and some minor nepotism, a small press had agreed to publish her novel. It was a rare victory and for a few weeks she felt unstoppable, powerful, a bringer of great things. Jonah had thrown her a massive party and had invited all his terrible Literature friends, and they sat in broken circles and read passages of the novel aloud and chugged wine and Calvados and laughed and outlasted the night. They sat on old lawn chairs and watched the sun rise above it all from the roof. There were no hangovers.

Then the reviews came. The reviews were an avalanche from which she had never quite recovered.

“It seems altogether too minor a work to deploy such grandiloquent condemnations, but in this instance I cannot help myself: this novel is a disgrace.”

“My favorite part was the cover.”

“Jonathan Franzen is spinning in his grave. This book killed him.”

“Redmond’s characters exhibit a stunted emotional range that runs the gamut between crying and sobbing. I have never read a novel in which so many women cried so many times and at so many inopportune moments.”

“I did enjoy the scene in which the racist father refuses to learn his lesson. It was the only realistic thing in the novel other than the fact the characters in Iowa were speaking English. Otherwise, this novel is a facile attempt at a serious work, a shadow of a shadow, a pointless diversion, a road no one need take.”

There were a few positive reviews, but even those seemed half-hearted, praise with caveats. The book made them laugh a bit, or the quirky fictional family reminded them of their own quirky family. Despite the review which had the fucking gall to condemn tears, in the days immediately following, Hannah cried quite a lot and drank even more. She switched from wine to whiskey and when she grew tired of whiskey she found vodka to be a crisp, efficient alternative. Vodka and water with a cigarette. Often, she felt as though she would explode.

She still had dozens, if not hundreds of copies of the book hidden in a closet, stacked high and tight in sharpie-labeled cardboard boxes. She had entertained thoughts of burning them, in some ritualized conflagration that might cleanse her of the stain on her honor and offer a moment of fiery catharsis, but in the end, that struck her as dramatic, and also a waste, and perhaps even a fire hazard. So, the surplus copies of Memoirs of the Dirt stayed as they laid, unread but unburnt. Soon after, things with Jonah finally broke down for good and he left, pledging his “undying love and affection” to her but assuring her they could no longer continue their partnership because he had other wars to fight. Hannah knew it was coming, and that he he had been merely waiting a polite amount of time after her failure to sever ties, and thus she was not heartbroken when he left. She was not happy, of course, but survival was never in doubt. The evisceration of her novel was much more painful than the man she sometimes had sex with deciding to run away because he thought he was Lord Byron and wanted to go make war against the Turk.

Hannah swore never to expose herself to the bloodlust of critics again, so she swore off novels, but still she wrote. She freelanced for magazines, some large, some less large. She was obsequious and insistent and filed on time and editors rewarded her for this.

And somehow her work had caught Johnny Dog Man’s eye. He had sent her fawning, almost unrealistic emails full of praise. He claimed he was an editor, and he’d love to work with her, or failing that, just meet her and shake her hand, the golden hand that typed such golden sentences. When she and William finally determined he was an actual person and not some elaborate pointless hoax, she had given him her number. This proved to be a mistake. He had been calling her for weeks. He left increasingly excited and deranged voice-mails and just the other day, told her he was passing through the Bay Area on the way to his new offices in Los Angeles and would she perhaps like to get dinner and a drink and talk about an “opportunity”?

And so here they were.

“Of course, I know your name!” Johnny Dog Man, “You’re Hannah fucking Redmond! You’re only the fucking voice of your fucking generation!”

In short order their food arrived and they got to chomping. Between mouthfuls, Johnny Dog Man kept the conversation alive. “I am so happy you had time to meet with little old me. This prime rib is fine! What a place, huh!”

Hannah had to agree. This Irish pub was absolutely a place. They didn’t go hard with the Irish theme. It was mostly just a place to drink beer. The clientele tonight seemed slumping tech workers, but there was also a bunch of loud college kids gathered around the dart boards, and some older local drunks, composed but cantankerous, arguing with familiarity.

“I’ve read everything you’ve written, even the bad stuff. Your piece about Cap’n Crunch and Tony the Tiger changed my life. I don’t say that lightly. You’re only the second person I’ve said that to and the first person was my mother.”

“Well, I appreciate that very, very much,” Hannah said, meaning it. “I didn’t know if anyone would…get it, you know what I mean? It’s sort of dumb, you know?”

“Never say that,” Jonny Dog Man said, leaning forward on his ballpoint elbows, chewing his prime rib like a saloon-keeper munching on tobacco, “I’ve shown that piece to everyone I know. Honest to God, I sent my mother that piece. And there’s one thing you need to know about my mother, and that’s that my mother hates everything. A lovely woman, a kind woman, but she hates everything and nothing makes her happy. She hasn’t spoken to her best friend Mandy in twenty-years because Mandy mispronounced a word once. But, you know what made Mother smile? Your article. She thought you captured the voices perfectly. Tucan Sam, that horny scumbag, Tony the Tiger the glory hound with addiction problems, Snap and Crackle and Pop as a sort of tragic trio doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Yes. She loved it. She’s even eating cereal again.”

Again, Hannah didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what to say,” she said, a bit moved, but also confused. “No. I do know. That means the world to me. Thank your Mother for caring about old cereal characters as much as I do.”

And now Johnny Dog Man was getting to business.

“I’ve been the Editor-in-Chief at the Shocker for two months. Are you familiar with our work?”

“I want to say yes. But…”

“That’s fine! We’re new to the game. Young guns. Young dogs. Now, as I said. I’m an editor. But don’t hold that against me! I have a mandate and a lot of money to sort of re-imagine the brand. But first, forget I mentioned that word. Brand. A terrible word! People who use it should be lined up against a wall and mutilated. In essence, my vision for the Shocker is to create a place for writers to write. Not aggregate, write. We’re going to plant our flag in the Earth and die to protect it, like the Iwo Jima men of old. Evil is not to be feared and the good can be won.”

He drank deep, and when he pulled the glass from his lips there were little beads of gin sitting on his lip.

“That sounds great,” Hannah said, “And important.”

“I want to send you to England.”

“England?”

“Yes, have you heard of it?”

“England England?”

“Yes, the country of England. Or is it the United Kingdom? What’s the difference? I don’t care! I’m going to send you there and you are going to write a story for me. A Hannah Redmond original.”

England. The Queen. Tea and butlers and secret gardens and dark satanic mills and vicious manners.

“I would absolutely love to accept, Mr. Dog Man, but there’s no way I can afford to go to England right now. To be honest, I probably couldn’t afford to go to Oregon.”

The Dog Man laughed.

“Oregon! Now that’s the wit I’ve come to expect from you! No, no, stop your objections. Two tickets to Gatwick airport are yours for the taking. Bring your husband. I don’t want to separate young lovers. I won’t have that on my conscience. I’ve seen Romeo and Juliet and in my opinion that play is a tragedy.”

“I don’t know what to say…”

“You’ll be there for two weeks. All expenses paid. As you can see, I have more money that I know what to do with, and this one time I want to use it for something righteous, not evil. Hannah, I meant it when I said you are the real deal, the genuine article, the sound and the fury. That wasn’t the hot air of a used car salesman closing in on a mark. I believe in you and down the line I’d adore for you to join the Shocker full time. So, just think of this as a dress rehearsal.”

Hannah laughed, still full of doubt, but filled with a sudden joy just imagining two entire weeks away from William’s parents. “Well. Okay, yes. I mean, I accept!”

They clinked glasses. She heard some of the college kids playing darts arguing about which of them could eat more.

“I guess I should ask: what exactly is the assignment?”

Johnny Dog Man grinned, once again exposing his weird straight grey teeth.

“Have you ever heard of the English Premier League, or as it is commonly known, the EPL?”

“No. Wait, maybe. No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Perfect! That is fucking perfect.”

To demonstrate how perfect it was, Johnny Dog Man swallowed roughly half of his Gin and Tonic in a single go before grinning wildly and saying, “Aaaah! Now that was a damn good Gin and Tonic!”

A misplaced silence settled over their table and lingered too long. The momentum of the conversation had stalled for reasons she could not understand. The murmuring din around them came to the forefront. Hannah began to catch snippets of conversation. Two older men at the bar began to argue about the definition of beauty. The bartender was dancing to a Mariachi version of “Crazy Train” and if Hannah was being honest, she was doing a damn good job.

Finally, Hannah asked, “So, what is the English Premier League or EPL?”

“It’s their big soccer league. Only they call it football there, which I admit, does make a certain amount of sense. Do you know anything about soccer? Football?”

“I could learn.”

“That’s great Hannah. That’s great and it is also perfect.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. This is exactly what I wanted. A classic fish-out-of-water story.”

“What?”

“A stranger-in-a-strange-land type deal! You’re the stranger, obviously. The strange land is England. Have you ever been to England?”

Hannah could have said “I’ve never been out of the country at all, except one time I went to Canada with Jonah and some of his awful friends who liked to argue about Heidegger and Wittgenstein and other super annoying shit and I drank so much that I threw up on the bus back to Seattle and Jonah told me afterwards that I had embarrassed him in front of his friends and not because of vomiting on the bus no actually that had been perfectly fine it was that the night before I had been chugging beer and yelling ‘I’m Hegel’s flipped dialectic, bitch!’ over and over again and that he no longer felt comfortable kissing me.”

But she only said, “No, I’ve actually never been to England.”

“Very strange place, got into some trouble with the law there once,” the Dog Man said, “Anyway, are we clear on what the English Premier League is now?”

“Yes, it’s their soccer league.”

“Hell yes, it is! Anyway, the EPL’s season is about to start.”

“Okay.”

“And here’s the rub: there is a well-known type of article that all the major content creators tend to push around this time of year. It’s geared towards Americans, who as I’m sure you are aware, generally don’t care about soccer or at least only pretend to. Do you personally know anyone who cares about soccer?”

“Yeah,” Hannah said, her mind pivoting at once to her crazy friend Patrice, though it might have been rugby that Patrice cared about so much. Patrice had always been crazy.

“Right. So, the sort of article I’m referring to is typically titled something like ‘The American’s Guide to English Football’ or ‘How I Chose my EPL Team’ or ‘How You Should Choose your Premier League Team’ or ‘Take this Quiz and Find Out Which Premier League Team You Should Support’ and you know, that kind of shit.”

“Sure, sure.”

“Well, those articles are bad. They disgust me. Maybe you learn that Prince George or whoever happens to be a fan of Arsenal and Sir Archibald of West Cockshire-on-the-Land supports Ipswich Town or that the nickname of this particular team is the Badger Fuckers or what have you. Still following?”

“Yes, Johnny Dog Man.”

“This is what I want: I want you to talk to real people. Real English people. And real Welsh people if you want, whatever, it doesn’t matter. And at the end of it, I want you to choose your EPL team.”

Hannah thought this sounded dumb. Why would anyone want to read this?

“Sounds simple enough.”

“No, not simple. No shortcuts. I want you to write from your guts. I want every sentence stained with blood, sweat, and tears. I want your paragraphs to reek of pain and victory and sorrow. I want to cum when I read your story. I want to cum!”

It seemed to occur to the Dog Man that he had crossed some line. His face twisted into a practiced expression of contrition.

“I’m sorry. That was deeply inappropriate. I should never say cum in a place of business.”

“No, probably not,” Hannah said, ready to move on, “We can let it slide this once.”

“I meant cum metaphorically.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Of course you do. You’re the writer!” And then Johnny Dog Man was all smiles again.

Hannah remembered something then, something a bit foul. A small pain, blunted, numb, atrophied, barely worth mentioning. She mentioned it, of course.

“You know, I was supposed to go to England once.” And Paris. And Madrid. And Rome. And Berlin. And…Krakow? Some weird place at the end…

“You don’t say.”

“Yeah. Didn’t work out. Oh well.”

“Yes! Use that! Heartbreak in a backwards land of beans and tea! The creaky old stadiums with their human stampedes! The big racist hooligans! The gutter pathos! That’s what I want. The raw shit. And yes, the grimy shit as well.”

The Dog Man had crawled past tipsy and was now operating full-on red-faced drunk. His sudden movements worried Hannah. He was definitely going to knock something off the table. At one point, on a trip to the bathroom, he lurched towards her, unsteady. She found herself transfixed by the spider web veins in the folds of his nose as he said to her, “Only the dead have seen the end of war, Hannah. Your Mommy and Daddy ought to have told you as much.”

While the Dog Man was pissing or shitting or just staring at himself in the mirror, Hannah ordered her final drink.

The rest of the night was just logistics. Tickets, airports, invoices, contracts, tax forms. Eventually, Johnny Dog Man paid the bill, gave her a final bony hug, and walked away humming “Smooth Criminal” and that was the last she saw of him.

Hannah had decided he was about thirty-nine years old.