Foobonia and Points West.

We conclude our look at Bull by catching up with him nowadays; we start off, of course, with his being the sort-of unwilling coach of the girl's teams. The reason that his being in charge of a group of young women alarms him is, strangely enough, a tendency towards chivalry; he worries about saying or doing the wrong thing and hurting the team. He's also troubled by his inability to relate to Jinx as well as he'd like to; it's sort of difficult for him to talk on her level because, well, he's still something of a jock and she's not. Good thing for both of them that Linda is there to keep things from getting too out of hand. Better still, he's got the sense to be grateful for what he has. He's not crippled by neuroses or hampered by an addiction so he's more or less in the same reasonably happy place as my next subject: Harry Klinghorn.

As promised, I'm about to do a character study on Bull Bushka. First, however, a bit of background; he seems to come from a long line of asshole athletes. His grandfather, Beanball Bushka, was a teammate of Toledo Mudhen Ed Crankshaft in the fifties; given that his nickname was given because the filthy sadist loved throwing baseballs at his opponent's heads at skull-cracking velocities and he was an unapologetic racist, you'd assume he'd be filled with petty malevolence. You'd be right; that's because his crowning achievement was to exploit Crankshaft's illiteracy to deny him his one chance to make the Majors. You'd also assume that a man that malevolent would raise his son to a blazing ball of hate as well; you'd also be right. The drunken arsewipe took out his frustrations on his son in spasms of alcoholic rage while filling Bull's head with the notion that the only way to succeed was to smash aside the weak; this, of course, made him the bane of Les's existence in high school. Things would have persisted had not Bull not finally stood up for himself; he, unlike the rest of his mostly nasty family, sought out therapy and quelled the rage inside him. This, of course, is lost on Modern-day Les who, unknown to Bull, still dreads being pulverized.