Nevertheless the fund flourished, thanks to a few well-timed investments, some lucky windfalls, some timely earthquakes, hurricanes, futures speculations, technology discoveries, droughts, genocides, tank tread recalls, rice shortages, Miss America controversies, celebrity deaths, the sudden rise of Pokémon, the invention of the home injection molding kit, iTunes, pancakes, and all those other tiny little minuscule bits and pieces of random minutia that no one, neither a Newton nor an Einstein nor even some kind of hyper-dimensional Heisenberg, could successfully track with one-hundred percent certainty. $350,000 soon became a few orders of magnitude larger, and winning third-place in professional racquetball tournaments became de rigueur for becoming a comfortably retired racquetball player with two kids in college, facelifts for the wife, a decent mid-sized sedan, a house only a few “easy” miles from the highway, hip surgery, and a newfound interest in paper zombie modeling, which is itself not really a very expensive hobby.

Sam Doctor sued James Lovington-Coven, demanding the money back, insisting JLC would not have made billions if it weren’t for SD’s seed money. JLC agreed in principle, if not in law, saying as much in an op-ed piece he submitted to the New York Times, although the piece was heavily edited by an overzealous editor named Edward Edmunds, and JLC was made to look like a sort of buffoon. Which he was. But not in writing. Our scene is a restaurant in Lower King Charles, an inburb of Philadelphia, and if you don’t know what an “inburb,” is, I bet you can figure it out.

James eyeballed the tortellini on his fork, still chewing the previous forkful, James chewing, not the tortellini chewing; tortellini can’t chew, but it can be chewed, so what James was chewing was tortellini, but not this forkful, not the one he was eyeballing, instead he was chewing the previous forkful. They all, these forkfuls, tended to look the same. And when chewed, chewed the same. For a while. By forkful 35 they did not chew as well. James chewed and eyeballed and thought about wine.

In stalked Sam. He went straight to the table where James was sitting/chewing/eyeballing/thinking. A waiter tried to stop him (Sam) and he (Sam) stiff-armed him (the waiter).

“You.” Sam said, slapping a folded copy of the New York Times down on the table.

“Doctor Sam,” James replied. His little joke.

Sam sat down opposite James. The waiter, having recovered, flipped a napkin onto Sam’s lap. Without breaking his lock-steady gaze on James, Sam said “Prosciutto. Stale bread. Red wine, I don’t care what kind, maybe some kind of blend, or whatever word you people use for blends of wine, but not Chianti, but make sure whatever wine it is it is poured from a Chianti bottle.” Sam slowly turned his head to face the waiter, who was still bent in napkin-flipping posture. Sam locked eyes with the waiter. “And I’ll be able to tell what kind of bottle it was poured from, so don’t fuck it up.”

The waiter scurried. The cell phone in the pocket in the jacket James wore jangled. Another zero had been added to his fund. Sam Doctor returned to glaring. James ate of the eyeballed forkful and made another forkful to subsequently eyeball. Sam opened the paper.

“I read this, this. What was this. This.”

James nodded. “At a loss for words? That has never happened to me, ever.” He took a sip of his wine. It was bloody awful. He took another.

“Don’t be smug.”

“Don’t demand I be contrite.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Which is why you don’t write poetry, Sam.”

Under the table Sam clenched his fist tight, believing it kept him from smacking James in his smug little face, when actually it was the size of the table relative to the length of Sam’s arm that would have prevented it. If sentient, the table would have been smug about this itself.

James chewed, squinted his eyes as he looked up and to the right, the universal sign for memory recall. “Federal authorities have always made it difficult to bring a legal challenge against the government’s warrantless wiretapping enterprise that was set up by the Bush administration in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks…” he began…

“Stop!” said Sam. “I can read. And I did, I read this, this. What was this. This.”

James leaned forward, chewing with his mouth partially open, like a cow chews its cud, or a gangster chews its rigatoni, greasy-lipped, sneering, about to tell it like it is, fill you in on how the world works, indicates, through colorful language, frank honesty, and harsh indifference, how existentialism ain’t just a 22-point word in Scrabble. “Some asshole at the NYT edited what I wrote.” On the word “edited,” a spit of wine-drops and tortellini-bits was spat, decorating the paper. “My first sentence was completely different.”

The waiter appeared, dropped a plate in front of Sam. The stale bread on the plate bounced. The waiter whipped a Chianti bottle towards the empty glass on Sam’s side of the table, and wine more or less filled it up. Some got on the paper. Sam ignored all of this. “Fine. What was your first sentence.”

James say back, chewing, his mouth closed, gazing at Sam. James didn’t need all of this. Being sued. Being accosted. A tiny bur of anxiety way down deep in his gut—where was Sam’s prosciutto? Being a poet meant noticing things, tiny details like this, worrying about them, wondering about them. Being a bad poet meant trying to write a poem about them when it occurred to him to worry and wonder. Being the worst poet in the world meant the poem he wrote about Sam’s Angry Prosciutto would probably win some prize, which he’d invest, which would earn him ungodless amounts of cash, which would prompt the prizegiver to sue, which would force James to write an op-ed piece in the New York Times, which would be poorly edited, which would lead to the prizegiver to accost him in a tiny little miniscule Italian restaurant in the Lower King Charles inburb of Philadelphia. The phone in his jacket pocket jangled again. (Have you figured out what “inburb” means yet?)

“I’m waiting,” said Sam.”

The waiter appeared. Prosciutto appeared. The waiter disappeared. James sighed.

Sam attempted to sop up some of the wine not in his glass with some of the bread not on his plate, since it was in his hand, since that’s where he’d put it when he’d picked it up to eat some of it which he had not done yet when the prosciutto arrived which he ate instead with his other hand. “Listen to me, God Damn It, James Lovington-Coven.”

“Coven.”

“What did you say?”

“You pronounced my name wrong.”

“I also read my wife’s three-week old copy of Us magazine while I sat on the commode this morning. Equally relevant. You listen to me.”

“Federal authorities have always made it difficult to bring a legal challenge against an artist’s monetary money-making enterprise that was the result of investing prize-winnings in the years after the September 11, 2001 attack.” James stabbed a tortellini, popped it in his mouth, and chewed viciously at Sam. “That’s what I wrote, buster. That’s what got edited.” Spit.

Sam was agog. “But that’s horrible. That’s an awful sentence. Monetary money-making? No wonder it was edited. And what the hells does any of this have to do with attacks on Sep. 11?”

James made a sad face. “He flipped the Ms into Ws, which connotes W, which connotes George W Bush, whom he added to the sentence, tying it nicely with the Sept. 11 thing.”

Sam just stared. “But it’s been used before. That sentence. An op-ed piece from March 22nd, 2011.”

“Yes.”

“Am I supposed to believe this is some kind of coincidence?”

The waiter, who should have shown himself at this point to break up the flow of the conversations, nevertheless remained disappeared.

“Yes?”

“Look, James Lovington-Coven, you listen to me.”

“Lovington.”

“Oh god.”

“You pronounced my name wrong.”

“You listen to me.” Sam turned to the approaching waiter. “Go away right now!” The waiter fled. Sam returned to James. “I’ll see you in court. Do you hear me? I’ve sued you, you’ve all but confessed to nefarious malfeasance in this horrible op-ed piece, and the wording only corroborates my case: you’re the worst poet in the world. You should not have won my prize.”

“Just as you say.” The plate of tortellini in front James was now devoid of tortellini. His glass of wine was bereft of wine. “But consider you this. Racquetball players.”

“What about them.” Without breaking his gaze on James, Sam lifted a hand, snapped his fingers, caused the waiter to appear, caused more wine to be poured, prosciutto to be placed, bread to be dropped, the plate in front of James to be taken away, the glass to be absconded with.

“Has it occurred to you? In this silly little tale of ours? How ‘racquetball’ could be replaced with pretty much any other single-person sport? Tennis or backgammon or championship cup-stacking? How it, in and of itself, has no real relevance whatsoever? How it would only resonate with someone who, say, has some sort of relationship with racquetball? Played it himself, maybe moved up a few D and C ladders at his gym? Or his wife, who loved racquetball because it got him out of the house a few nights every week so she could do whatever she wanted, watch Desperate Housewives or some other stereotypical shit like that? Or the girl at the front desk at the gym, who hated racquetball, because he came in two nights a week, and every other schlep threw her a leering grin when they walked in, which she hated, despised, the perverted assholes, but not this guy, no, he was so deep in thought, thinking about the coming match, thinking about how he’d heard this next guy, Kyle, had a mean backhand but was really weak in the corners, and he never gave the girl at the front desk a leering grin when he walked in, and she hated him, because instead of hating him for being a pervert, he made her think he didn’t like her, and she hated him for making her self-conscious like that, who did he think he was, anyway, coming in here, easily forty pounds overweight, those stupid racquetball goggles on his forehead, his hair all messed up, already wearing his stupid racquetball glove, did he really think he was too good to ignore someone like her? What would she think if she knew our story, Doctor Sam? How many girls working at the front desk of a gym populated by racquetball-obsessed middle-aged men are there who would take from our story with its easily replaceable “racquetball” reference something more than what anyone else who hasn’t even thought about the existence of racquetball would take from the rest of it?

Sam stood up and pointed. “That’s what was wrong with your poetry. Every word easily replaceable. The whole thing was arbitrary. It was easily the worst poem in the world.” Sam dropped thirty-five bucks on the table, spun, and stomped away. “I’ll see you in court!” he shouted as he went out the door.

In a single continuous fluid motion the waiter swam past the table leaving behind a fresh plate of tortellini and a glass of wine and redisappeared himself and James scooped up a forkful and eyeballed it as the motion of all that came to a languid stop. The cell phone in the pocket of the jacket he wore jangled. Out loud, James said to no one listening:

Ladies and Gentleman, my wife and I Fought over how to tell you about Children abandoned in sand. Playgrounds we paid to drink at; I remember her suit was made: Brittle iron, cold silk and sheets, Sheets of clay. Grandmothering The neighbors’ kids, broken bicycles In our shared driveway, grunge rock Shattered windows, home from college, Christmas girlfriends, boyfriends, abortions. In the aftermath of the fight, Heaving bosom and clenched fist, I and my wife agreed we would not Tell you about our shameful pride.