One way or another you find things out about people. After a tenant leaves, we always find something, objects hidden and for-gotten about or just left behind. We’ve found bottles of pills and birthday cards, cassette tapes and jewelry and pictures drawn on the backs of playing cards. We use these things to put together a better idea of the people we thought we knew.

Tom Dodges, for example, left behind two ink-stained bras, a mason jar of gasoline, a book on ventriloquism, and a pillow-case stuffed with dog hair. Tom Dodges, a grown man! He moved out to attend a technical college and was replaced by a loud, chumpy dope my mother and I refer to as “The Sportsman.” The Sportsman worked as a printer and presented me with dozens of single-sheet calendars picturing naked women leaning against motorcycles or bent over the hoods of troubled cars: women holding tools as if they were trophies they had won for being pert and shameless.

“Add this to your collection,” he would whisper. After a while I stopped opening them.

The Sportsman was clinically obsessed with any game involving a ball. Any round object that moved along the ground or through the air; smacked with a bat or club, kicked, dribbled, passed by hand or prodded with a cue, mallet, or paddle — it commanded his full attention. He followed all games, either on television or radio, the volume so loud that it could be heard all the way down the street. It was his habit to coach the players from wherever he happened to be. “Cahill, you shithead, what’s your problem? Jesus Christ, you couldn’t catch a fucking cold. Hand that uniform over to your mother, why don’t you, you faggoty piece of shit.”

It got on my nerves in a big way. Even with tissue stuffed into my ears I could still hear him from my bedroom. I made it a point to avoid him, but certain people can’t take a clue. The moment I passed his window or open door he would call out, “Hey, Dale, you watching the game?”

“No.”

“You’re kidding me, right? The Stallions are ahead by eight points with twenty minutes left in the game and you mean to tell me you’re not watching? What are you, some kind of an apple-polisher, running off to polish some goddamned apple?”

He would rapidly rub his hands along the sides of his sweaty beer can, a dopey illustration of the verb polish, and then, thank-fully, the televised ball would regain his attention and I was able to pass.

The hands-down worst day of my entire life was the October afternoon when the Sportsman took me to an actual football game. He had bought the tickets in advance and arranged everything with my father. I would sooner eat a Vaseline sandwich than witness two minutes of a football game on TV, let alone an actual, live game. I began feigning illness three days in advance, unforgiving chills accompanied by memory loss and a stiffening of the joints. I was in my bedroom, moaning, when the Sportsman arrived at my door, accompanied by my father.