Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  There is no ceremony. These are simply the things I do in between. I leave the shower, walk down the hallway back to my room. For a second, a cloud can pass in front of the moon. I do math in my newly shorn potato. I will wrestle something like twenty-four times this season if everything goes how it’s supposed to, and round it off to seven minutes per match, giving a total of, what’s that, 168 minutes total. Less than three hours—168 minutes—that’s what will be put down in the records, to be permanently studied by the world’s progeny, tracing the table’s lines with their fat fingers. The 168 minutes that matter. The rest, what won’t be recorded, is clipping toenails, dead whale thoughts, toweling off your human skinfolds, breaking scentless wind on boiled chicken breasts and oil-free vegetables, fondling your belly button, jumping off your bed to touch the ceiling, reaching in your desk down below your collection of help line and faith pamphlets and pulling out your Barron’s, turning to the “350 Most Common Words” page. Impecunious. Inane. Incontrovertible. Infamy. Inimical. The rest is maneuvering your mind away from the wrong things, more than keeping to the right things.

  I’ll tell a secret: think about what connects the rest to the 168 minutes. That’s it. Everything else is flensing. The past is flensing. Losing is flensing.

  I do push-ups. My towel falls off at twenty. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight twenty-nine thirty thirty-one thirty-two thirty-three thirty-four thirty-five thirty-six thirty-seven thirty-eight thirty-nine forty forty-one forty-two forty-three forty-four forty-five forty-six forty-seven forty-eight forty-nine fifty. Wormhole, black hole. Invisible far-off radio frequency. Unknown bloop from the hadal deep. I’m trying to push into a deeper place.

  PRACTICE IS ONLY AS BORING and difficult as it looks. And it looks something like an active prison playground: two dozen wrestlers puttering around, their goals hidden in the silence of their heads, Led Zeppelin and Cream at seven thirty in the morning, sounds of slapping. The dry winter gym heating inside your mouth and hair. I believe that the more time you spend thinking about what the fuck you’re doing here is in direct proportion to your worseness. If you just buy into the craziness, you’re a lot better off. Did you know that in the Roman Empire, a doctor, upon consulting a woman overrun by hysteria, would instruct his assistant to make loud noises and release bad smells into the room to scare the womb back into position, and that the assistant wouldn’t think twice? That’s why the Roman Empire lasted fifteen hundred years. I bought in a long time ago.

  To keep on task mentally takes practice, just like practicing switches or cradles, but my personal choice is, for instance, to picture the Subway turkey, six-inch, wheat, no cheese, no mayo I’ll permit myself afterwards, the roughly 280 calories I’ll get back, the chemicals released in the brain upon smelling the steam of Subway bread. I like to think about what’s in front of me, the two dozen matches spread out over long days, and how these sloppy practices are the means in between. I don’t need food anyway, I fill my guts with this.

  I’m paired up with Whitey Williams, who looks like a ghoul because of a propane tank incident when he was thirteen. His face is both the color and texture of uncooked ground beef. He’s 141 and he likes to go with me in practice because he’s bigger but I’m faster. I don’t mind, but he has this rare disorder where there are these outgrown nubby flaps of skin all down his spine. I’ve told him, “Your back looks like a fucking stegosaurus.” At least seven times since I’ve been here, I’ve seen Whitey get an early first-period takedown in matches because his opponent will touch the stegosaurus back and get creeped right out of his zone before realizing that he’s going to lose if he doesn’t stop screwing around and touch the nubs.

  He goes outside single, but I bear down and turn over to grab on to his back but he’s up before then so we’re just hitting at each other. He’s telling me about this girl named Lauren who he caught staring at him in the library. He went over and asked, why are you staring? And she said, because you have the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. And so Whitey said, wait until you see my back. And when he lifted his shirt up right there in the library and presented her the nubs, she basically shit her pants and dragged him back to her dorm room saying, I must paint you, I must paint you right now. But when they got back to the room there was no sign of the painting materials anywhere, Whitey said, and before he knew it she had pushed him on the bed and he realized she was only trying to get his shoes and socks off. Interested to see where this was going, he watched as she got his feet naked.

  He gets a hand on my scalp and pulls. “Shrimping. Are you familiar with it? It is the meeting of toes and the suck function of the mouth in the name of sexual pleasure.”

  I flip his arms outside and get him tied up from the inside. Knowing Whitey’s a liar and also because it’s gross, I just say, “Well.”

  “It was something completely out of right field.”

  “Left.”

  “What left?”

  “It’s left. Left field.”

  “Oh, fuck you.”

  This is all at half speed, fireman’s carries at half speed, duck-unders and takedowns and rides at half speed. Coach Hargraves blows the whistle and people move to different places. I’m on my back and Coach Whiting has his hands on my forehead and I’m lifting against him pushing down, I’m doing army crawls across the length of the gym, I’m jumping rope, I’m doing the pegboard, I’m doing pencil rolls, I’m doing the stairs and holding on to my vomit until I get to the trash can, I’m wrestling Simon Fjelstad and Harry Pfaff and Paul Kryger, who is my weight and wants to be better than me, but he will never be better than me. All is necessary and intentional, the way I like it. If one thing slips a screw, I screw it back in until it’s sound again. One of the coaches walks around saying, “Miles City, Miles City.” I take a breath and blow snot on my sleeve. If you’re doing it right, it feels like getting caught in a small room with a bleach scent. I’ve learned thirstiness is a temporary matter, it’ll just go away if you wait long enough. I get a short break and stare up past the wall mats and the empty spots where banners are supposed to hang. The sharp white lights turn the skin both pasty and clear, sweat looks messier, and I’m conditioned to pay attention to what I’m seeing, not unlike how operation room lights make you pay attention. I never stop paying attention. I pay attention to Linus doing twenty pull-ups and then waiting to do twenty more. Pete Crest jumps off the mat, where he’s been near-fighting with Clark Lowe, he takes off his shirt and ties it around his head to catch the sweat, and for a second I think he’s going to take his shorts off, but instead he dives at Clark for real, trying to actually fight him until they’re separated. I pay real attention and can hear the other part of the team slamming weights over in the weight room down the hall.

  Paul Kryger is an antagonistic Dutch lunatic, but he doesn’t see what I’m doing, he’s too busy trying to beat me. No one likes to do live-gos with him because at least half the team’s had his fingers up their asses—he’s basically set the world record for checking the oil. Some have gotten used to it. He’s checked my oil in the past and still tries to sometimes, but he’s not good enough for it to be a nagging problem. During our live-go he’s expected to come at me and does. Spit from his mouth lands in mine when he tries to pull behind me, saying, “Fuck you, Florida, fuck you.” The coaches are yelling at him to shrug. But I wait for things to go my way. He can’t shrug past my right side because I push down on his head with my right arm and twist him like a scarf in my lap. He’s muttering, “Fuck you, Florida, you fancyboy, you pussy shit,” and jamming his elbow into my ribs, hard, because he wants to take the 133 spot from me. He stabs the point of his elbow between two of my lower ribs. “Hey,” someone says, “hey.” But if I have bruises on my ribcage, where would I be without them? I would not be myself if I didn’t have bruises on my ribcage. And th
ough Paul Kryger wishes me to die, wishes me to leave Oregsburg and never come back so he can be the 133, he’ll never get it because he doesn’t want it as bad as me, and all I would like to tell him is he would be better if he wasn’t so angry, that is, if he wasn’t so stupid on top of being so angry, but I don’t tell him this. I don’t tell him anything. I feel no pity for Paul Kryger or Paul Kryger’s future bride and unborn grandchildren, who surely will be bastards, who are all going to be denied the story that Paul Kryger was the 133. I will make sure that story never exists. I will take something away from him so that he’ll never have it. And while he’s calling me a bitch pussy and banging my ribs I kneel down and get him onto my shoulders like a baby lamb, he’s a baby lamb now. He is guided by my arms to the mat, and thereupon he finds his disappointment.

  I’m told by Coach Farrow, “Jesus, Florida, you can’t slam him like that or they’ll see it in the match,” but I know he doesn’t mean it. Kryger, holding his hand, has to be taken to the training room by Fink, but I’ll give him credit because he doesn’t whine or anything.

  Suicide sprints, jump rope, rope climbing, five times, arms only. Two and a half hours after I’ve started, I’ve finished. I go to the showers and get dressed. I brush the vomit out of my teeth and get my backpack.

  STUDENTS TEACHERS DESKS PENCILS PAPERS. They’re on the other side of the wall, I’m in my garden knocking over and smashing the flowers.

  I took extra classes my first couple years so I could take fewer classes my last couple semesters. This fall I’m doing Drawing II, Meteorology I, Basic News Writing, and What Is Nothing? I worked ahead and I use the extra time for practice. It’s not that I don’t want to get my education, I just have to save my energy for the right things. In another life, if I wasn’t so good with my body, who knows, maybe I could’ve been on the cum laude list instead of doing half measures to ride out a 2.6. Outside of wrestling, I’ve always taken what I could get. They offer tutorship but I don’t partake. It’d just be one more person you’d have an obligation to, and anyway, I’ve realized you can get by just by picking out a few specific things you like for papers and memorizing for tests. For example, in my Politics of Therapy class, I ignored all the other thinkers once I heard about Wilhelm Fliess, who talked about how the nose is tied to your privates in the 1800s and it’ll sometimes bulb up during screwing and a lot of times people will sneeze over and over during (he even came up with a surgical procedure to cut that tie), and I knew I was going to write about it. I got a B- and the paper was titled “Looking to Our Past for Our Future.” Also for example, I could draw and explain the AD–AS model like the back of my hand. College is easier than high school.

  I go to the rooms I’m supposed to on time and keep my head above water. Probably I could’ve gotten more out of my classes. I like to understand things. I like to spot problems and try to figure them out, which is all wrestling really is. When education is practical, I’m in favor of it: for example, the first time I visited a library resulted in the high school sophomore fistfight with the boy named Maxime, a tall French boy who liked to skateboard. He and I did not get along, he had a habit of zigging in front of my path as I walked into school, and when one day I told him he’d better find a new place to skateboard, he said some French words to me that went by too fast but I caught salaud. I wrote it down on a piece of paper. That afternoon, I went to the library and took a French-to-English dictionary from the shelf. I found the class Maxime was going to come out of, and when he came out that was that. The result of all this was three days’ suspension and two weeks’ detention, which I spent on cheap daydreams about being on the deck of a boat where the wind was so strong it blew off my cap! It was hard for me to doubt the practical value of books after that.

  I leave Meteorology, where I got a C- on the midterm because I messed up the sizes and temperatures of the atmosphere layers and because I forgot the chemistry compositions—the argons mixed up with the neons and that kind of thing. But in the long run, I still think it’s a good class for me because there’s a lot of matching, a lot of if-it’s-not-this-it’s-that. This type of thing is like a mental trip to the fishing lake. It’s relaxing to think that Leon Battista Alberti invented the anemometer in 1450, which can measure wind speed and wind pressure.

  These facts move to a light place somewhere toward the back of my brain. Food is an afterthought, class is an afterthought, people relationships are an afterthought, hydration is an afterthought, sleep is an afterthought.

  I cut through the brown grass on my way to Drawing in the McKnight Studio, which is by a parking lot and the road bordering campus. I pass some dead landscaping with nylon tape stuck in the branches. From under some bare plants, a male finds a splotch of snow, balls it up with a few mulch sticks poking out, and fires it harder than he needs to at a female, who screams in shock when it hits her shoulder. When the laughing male tries to come up and apologize, she takes a mulch bit out of her hair and tries to stab his ear with it. The two of them go running right past Kyle Glanville, who’s a nice kid with a skully face. I met him three years ago in my orientation group and, as it turned out, he’s one of sixteen or so black students out of the eleven hundred total enrollment.

  “Hey, Stephen, what’s up?”

  “Hey, Kyle. Where you headed?”

  “I put off fucking math until I couldn’t anymore. Geometry. Sucks.”

  “I took that two years ago. You got, um, what’s her name, Corrigan?”

  I can see from his face that we’ve talked about this exact thing before. “Yeah. I’m with all freshman and sophomores. They think I’m special needs and I hate it.”

  “Secants. Descants. I can’t remember any of that. I just remember there was a parabola on the final problem and she gave me quarter credit for putting the vertex and the, what do you call it, in the right place on the graph.”

  “Shit. The final has parabolas on it?”

  “Yeah.” Because I don’t know what else to do, I look up at the top of the clock tower.

  “What’s that there?”

  “My spit cup. Got a match soon.”

  “Oh cool.”

  “Water weight.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So.” When I try to inch away, he doesn’t move. His hands are holding his backpack straps, and I don’t know if he’s lonely or if people are racist to him or just uninterested. If he thinks we were supposed to be friends because we were in the same orientation group.

  He says, “Hey, you wanna hang out sometime?” Kyle Glanville is a person who could’ve been a more important thing in my life, I think, just like how sleeping in or camping could’ve been a more important thing.

  “I can’t,” I say, and he understands, I think, and when he says “See you around,” I get that he doesn’t mean it. His tone shuts the door.

  I have five minutes until class, so as cars fly by at fifty on the road posted twenty, I wait in the parking lot outside McKnight, which is basically a big shed. Drawing II! Oregsburg College has hidden me under the umbrella of its bachelor of arts in liberal studies degree. That is superior intellectual padding. I was told I could “design” my curriculum! Well, I did: I’ve taken classes called Crisis Communication, Debating Human Rights in China, Mass Atrocities, Food Chain Physics, and Theories of Leadership. Before I stopped trying so hard at school, history used to be my favorite subject, especially bad history, because knowing about the worst things that had happened was somehow the only way to make them any less horrific. I don’t remember one thing from Chemistry of Life, or even the name of the professor who taught it, only that she was a woman. I got a C in that. There are textbooks for these classes. I couldn’t believe it! Can I be expected to buy all of them, let alone read all of them? Class is a hobby. They cut you all this slack, they keep cutting it year after year. This walking back and forth to buildings, remembering facts and opinions temporarily just to spit them back out and forget forever, it’s what passes for occupation until a match.

  Durin
g the first week or so I met Linus, he said, “Don’t you feel like it’s … a little bit weird here?”

  I remember looking down at the legs of my chair, which Linus was bending back. They were cracking. “I don’t know,” I said, which was true. I didn’t know, because it’d never occurred to me to notice whether the school was weird, or ordinary, or whether it was something in between. I was using Oregsburg for a different purpose than every other student around me, including Linus. I remember thinking at the time that nothing would be any different for me if the school had one hundred thousand students or one. And what I said next was, “You’ve never been to this part of the country before. Probably you’re just used to where you’re from and need to get used to around here,” which was maybe a little true, but anyway was good enough because he nodded.

  And still, these silly classes I took make up what turns out to be my higher education. It will always be a part of what I am, things happen and then fall away, it’s no less permanent than what happens in a match. I have to live with all of it. And lately, twenty-one years of living with things has begun to wear thin. Eighteen years of living with it, then graduating to three more years of living with it, where all you do is live with it. I’m up to my neck in it, I’m stuck with all this history and it never leaves me alone. It’s enough to make you imagine what could’ve been different, to make you turn over small thoughts about whether what you are is what you should be, whether you’ve made the correct choice. I just need one thing to live with that I want to live with. That’ll be enough.