by Habash, Gabe
And what am I going to do with myself, with a degree in liberal studies? To which I answer: Have you even been listening?
There’s a girl standing next to me in the parking lot.
“Hello,” she says. I know her.
“Hi. I know you.”
“Mary Beth,” she says. “I was in your Drawing I class. Last fall.”
“You’re a better drawer than me.”
“You wrestle?” Her breath fog is close enough to nearly reach my face when she talks.
“You remember?”
“Not really, maybe a little. You got the ears, the puffy,” she says. “What’s so good about wrestling?”
Wrestling is a series of momentary ejaculations, passions that originate and evolve based on their relationship to another’s passions. Wrestling is, at its core, one passion set against another passion for the purpose of determining which is stronger. “I always liked it,” I say.
“You any good?”
“Yes.”
“Did you do the homework?”
“Yeah, I sat in that parking lot over there last week and did the gestures of the people going into the stores.” I point to the buildings across the road, the Pharmart and the twenty-four-hour diner, Allnighter.
“Can I see? Are they good?”
“No. Are yours good?”
“I went to the nursing home, you know, Early Sunshine? I got some of the old people sitting on the porch and watching TV and stuff. I think they’re all right.”
She gets out her pad and shows me, her fingers touching mine for a moment. Her drawings are really good. There’s one of a woman in a wheelchair pointing right at me. I don’t know how she got the perspective right.
“Do you have a match this weekend?”
“A quad. Three matches. In Montana.”
“How are you going to do the assignment? For next class?”
“I’m not sure. Other classes I can do in the van but not drawing.”
“Right.”
“The car shaking and all, you know?”
“Well, I hope you win your matches.”
“Thank you.”
She puts her pad back in her backpack. “Are there any women wrestlers?”
“Probably, somewhere,” I say, and then add unhelpfully: “If I were born a woman and all other circumstances were the same, I’d be a wrestler.”
“Tell me your name again.”
“Stephen.”
“I think we’re late, Stephen.”
ON THE NIGHT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO LEAVE for Miles City, a reported snowstorm on the Montana border pushes the departure to the next morning. I can’t sleep, so I put on my sweatshirt and go outside.
I take the usual route, around the Finch Building and past the Memorial Classroom Building, where during Shakespeare and our out-loud reading, I read as Malvolio (I could act all right) and talked about the yellow garters, rooms where there are ghosts of my flatulence, ghosts of my fingertip dust, hair ghosts, ghosts of my presentation on China’s treatment of farm workers that I got a C on because the professor told me I both completely skipped over the Big Jump Forward and said the words “not good” too much. In the underpass where the science labs run above, there’s a clump of both sexes, their chatter echoing off the tunnel walls. One female says an economics professor has been fired (“banned for life from setting foot on Oregsburg’s campus” is the exact wording) for punching a boy in the mouth during his class because he wouldn’t stop whistling. Then another female asks her friend how she got so skinny and the other female says she tricked herself into believing toothpaste is a dessert. Now she brushes her teeth five times a day. Then a male says to the group, “What the fuck is a 401(k)?” There are so many people at Oregsburg I dimly recognize, a foggy family a thousand children big put together for four years, small enough that you keep running across the same people who end up meaning nothing to you, the same way they don’t recognize me, don’t know that I wrestle every day for the school like a servant.
Near the clock tower I go around pulling up the decorative winter cabbages they’ve just planted.
I walk into the student union. A vending machine, a TV, some chairs and couches. On the other side of the building, where you can’t see, there’s the cafeteria full of things I can’t have. All-purpose tile, all-purpose carpet, big windows, bathrooms down a little hallway. No one is around, so I sit on the couch. Idle time is not my friend. Someone’s left behind a novel about knights, which I read for thirty seconds before boredom falls on me like a collapsed tent. Sometimes I wonder, if I were a character in a book, would I be sympathetic? Would I make a good good guy? On TV, there’s video footage of a four-story building in Philadelphia that’s fallen in on itself. The bottom of the screen says people are inside, trapped or worse. But no one is watching. No one is in the room.
A moment later, the door opens again, and a cleaning lady enters in her blue uniform and her yellow rubber gloves with her wheely trash can. I’m sitting there, by myself, rubbing my head on the couch.
“Hello,” she says.
“Hello,” I say. “That accent is familiar. I want to say Italian?”
“I am from Russia.” She picks up a smaller trash can and dumps it into the larger trash can. There are old muscles in her arms. Her name tag says “Masha.”
“Which part?” I ask, and she says an unspellable word that I guess goes with a place.
“Is there a college in that place you said?”
“Yes, there is a college. And there is a park with a lake and the big bus that will take you and fifty more and buildings that are bigger than any buildings in this part of America.” I ignore her civilized picture of her hometown. Instead I imagine girl Masha playing in the dirt with roosters and hens, and there’s a sky that’s not nice to look at, Masha pairing up the right rooster for the right hen, rubbing her muddy hands on the eggs that come back from her matchmaking.
“Is America strange?”
“Not so strange.”
I like to imagine why she came here, but only if it stays vague and safe and I don’t have to think too deeply about it. I like to think it was a specific moment that disrupted her life and birthed out who she’d become, the one doing a circle around the student union and taking out all the trash.
“You clean the floor where I live. McCloskey. I’ve seen you using the utility closet. It’s right near my room.” If you go into the bathroom a little after midnight, sometimes you’ll hear Masha sheepishly call out from the doorway, “Hello, may I enter?”
“Yes.” She has frazzled reddish hair. “I am very tired. Very tired all the time. All the time I work five to one. I clean one out of four parts of the college, there are three other cleaning women who do what I do, but the other parts of the college. Sometimes I see them when I go between the buildings, and they are very tired. But what do I say? It is quiet. It is all the time quiet.”
“That’s true.”
“So I just go to work. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. It is Friday, you know?”
“Yes,” I say, though I don’t know what exactly I’m agreeing with.
“And you? You study at the college to be doctor?”
“No, not a doctor.”
“Oh.” She has begun spraying blue cleaning fluid on the windows. It runs down and she catches it with a rag. “You are coming to the college to do something different?”
“Yes.”
“Your family is happy.”
“Yes.” At some point, I’ve stood up from the couch, but I don’t know when. “And what about your family? Are they here?”
“My husband go when we come to here. He go with my daughter and he go with her. I do not hear from them.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Ah, it is O.K. I just work, you know?”
“Yes.”
“Your mother and father, they must be proud to send you to the college.” She has finished with the windows, doing a not very good job, l
eaving loopy streaks all over. “I am proud of my daughter. I have not seen her for seven years.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Ah, it is O.K.” She pushes her trash can up to the side of the couches a couple of feet from me. There’s some kind of stain on the carpet. Kneeling down next to it and taking a bottle of carpet cleaner from the little rack attached to her can, she sprays seven or eight times and the white foam curls over the spot. “See, it is O.K.” She reaches out her rubber glove and puts it on my tennis shoe. I get the sick, gross feeling of excitement at the bottom of my stomach. She puts her other hand on my shin and rubs it. Her glove leaves a wet handprint on my sweatpants. We get to the place we’re trying to go, which is her standing next to me and us touching each other. Her gloves have come off. The erection returns compulsorily, which is a word in the Barron’s. Is it O.K. that the first reason I like that this is happening is because she’s just so nice? And that the second reason is because I’m lonely? God, I love a challenge but sometimes I can’t take the withdrawal! Her fingers warm up. There is no kissing. My eyes close, I hope hers do, too.
“You are smart young man,” says Masha. “You would like to occupy me a tergo?”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
While I likewise touch her through her official blue pants, I am aware that she is Masha, the one and only Masha. I take my nonbusy hand to the top of her polyester pantyhose and leave it there, fisted up in the seam. Her unsentimental jerking finger motions are good in a final, definite way. She is a woman who’s had sadness and means business. The woman on TV says a man in South Dakota is causing nervousness among residents in his town because he is carrying a hammer around everywhere. It’s been going on for two weeks. He hasn’t done anything yet, but he’s frightening the neighbors, who are calling it “menacing.” But the police can’t do anything, there’s no law against carrying hammers.
It is difficult to stop her before the orgasm shows up, but I do. There are many monk qualities in me.
“I have matches in nine hours. I wrestle. I have to keep my competitive, you know, intacted.”
She nods. “You are the smart young man. Always thinking.”
I say, “Can I ask how old you are?”
“I am fifty-three.”
“Jeez. Well. I have to go now. Thank you for making me feel better.”
“You are a young man with the beautiful haircut.” She taps my face not super gently, and pushes the trash can out the door.
The TV woman reports that North America is experiencing irregular weather patterns.
I pull the drawstring tight and reiterate I haven’t broken any rules.
And then the news ends. That’s when the TV goes black and the place is quiet for a moment, and I see the men’s bathroom door slowly close. It’s down a hall in the corner, thirty feet, next to the women’s and a door that opens to who-the-fuck-knows.
“Masha?”
I can’t tell if I’m alone. A weird silence fills the room like a gas. Nothing happens that doesn’t really happen. This is what I keep telling myself. The Frogman is the thing under the drain.
I push open door number three and end up outside by the Finch classrooms. I run back to McCloskey fast. I run on the main path, no one around. I’m not fast enough, something is behind me. But I get to the lobby, sprint through it, where the two students working the front desk cheer at me, tell me to go faster. I hurry to my room and slam the door. I have either been gone twenty minutes or two hours.
One night when I was nine or ten, I noticed the water was draining slower in our shower. So I finished showering and, still naked, I kneeled and lifted up the drain. The last of the water gurgled down. The way our shower was, the drain had this silver disc at the top. I pulled on that. There was a bending metal stake attached to the end that was supposed to reach down the pipe. Wrapped around the stake was a huge glob of hair, but it wasn’t just hair. It was fingernail bits, what looked like skin, and white and green globes or eggs stuck in it. It was this bulbous, furry wet mass that was clinging to the bottom of my drain, where I stood every night, sitting under there all along.
There’s something I’m scared of.
A note slides under my door. I sit still waiting to hear whoever left it move away. Five minutes pass. Nothing. I quietly move toward the note and pick it up.
I SEE YOU
I turn it over, with the feeling I always get when the Frogman’s nearby.
COME BACK FROM MILES CITY WITHOUT LOSING OR I WON’T GO AWAY
I DON’T HAVE THE PATIENCE FOR THIS. Steele looks like Sterling looks like Richardton looks like Dickinson looks like Belfield looks like Wibaux looks like Glendive looks like shut in the van for six hours with a lot to think about, looks like a big straight line with a million fence posts, looks like something stuck in your teeth. And when you want out of your skin so you can rush somebody and just get your match started already, and when you get out of the van six hours later, the same things are still there to think about because you haven’t made any headway into finishing them off—that won’t happen until the referee lets you go with his fucking whistle. I walk into the gym faster than the rest of them, I’m the first one to the locker room and pick the one in the corner.
I do my weigh-in. Fiddle-fit.
Pedialyte. Yogurt and half a bagel.
What will make my thoughts less ugly while I wait for my turn? I live in these little chambers of dissatisfaction like a frustrated prince. I’m constantly reminded that I’m not owed anything.
Look at the ceiling. Stands ten rows high, half empty, half the people in them other wrestlers from the three other schools waiting for their turn. Twelve, thirteen … fourteen total women. Two black mats, two matches going at once. A man in a sweatshirt with a camera. Two boys with ammonia spray and a towel. No windows. Subduing your gross need to gag. Forgetting the human body has bleed and tear and break functions, never mind that there are small squares of your head designed just to inform you about fear and misgivings. Forgetting all that and replacing it with What You Have Convinced Yourself Is True. There. That’s what it looks like. Now you can take a test where they ask you what a match in Montana looks like and pass that shit.
Some of the famous wrestlers throughout history include George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin. In seventh grade, to get you interested they tell you this, but I didn’t need any extra interest and I would’ve stuck any of those assholes.
Take notes, here comes the routine. Fifteen minutes before the first match I walk out of the spectating area and exit the gym altogether. A parking lot, a basement, a bathroom, any of them will do, the only thing that matters is that no one is around. I am by myself. For a full twelve minutes, what happens is brainstorm time. This looks like my warm-ups coming off, taking shots at an imaginary opponent, jumping rope quick enough that it whistles. In my private corner, I spit on the ground. I tell myself I will come back to that thing I’ve left—that spit—in fewer than ten minutes, and I will have won. I’ve done this so many times that I know when twelve minutes are up, I’m on a schedule, I’m a creature of habit and something clicks, and then I go from privacy into the gym and to the edge of the mat and wait for my opponent, I’m skin and gristle and little water, Stephen Florida without end Amen.
As a rule, I study up on the first opponent, which I know beforehand, and then take things as they come and do my scouting on the rest between matches. For the last three days, I have reserved lurid visions of my match with Brett Espino, a junior from McNaire College who likes to bait. This is an apprentice tactic, I’ve spent the span of time in which I slide into night sleep thinking about Brett’s visage in sharp discomfort, his teammates forced to watch, the purple that comes to his cheeks as the inevitability mounts, shame, purple shame for everyone, and in my dorm bed the thoughts of all these things give me a clenched nutsack and a moderate boner. I am ready for you, Mr. Espino.
Spit on the ground. Cue the villain music.
On the place where the floor changes to mat, Linus puts his forehead on mine. Stable as a table. Coach Hargraves smacks my headgear. Good-luck tug. I stand in the middle of the circle and wait as he comes up to me. I look right into Brett Espino’s face. If there was a Nobel Prize for wrestling I’d win that shit every year.
Before the referee can speak, I say, “I’m going to have fun eating you, Brett.”
“Cut that out, red,” the ref says, “or I’m killing this before it starts.”
Tasks of repetition. Times of perfect fulfillment. You’re only who you really are when you’re doing what you really want. I am so much myself, I could never be anyone else. I keep up the task of finding out how the world works, locating its pulley systems, and placing myself in the center. Facts: A human thighbone is stronger than concrete. The stuff in a camel’s hump comes out green. I didn’t learn these things without falling off the horse. Get back on the horse. That’s a fucking saying you’ll have to get used to if you’re going to find your center. Inherent in it is how fucking repetitive getting back on the fucking horse is. Get back on it. Get back on it. Tell yourself you’re not a wastrel, you’re not carrying on for nothing. Drink your green camel-hump juice and say to yourself you’re not a wastrel. Find your center and fuck it until it’s pregnant with your little babies so they can come out and find more centers to fuck.
From the whistle, like I knew he would, he tries to bait me. He won’t let me tie him up. He keeps moving away. I keep trying. He’s watching my belly button. I’m watching his face. He’s moving clockwise around the circle. What is so strange about this is that I’m on a road I’m going to be on exactly once, I’m never going to be here again. I’m never coming back. He smacks my hands away. He wants me to go low. Half the period’s passed with me trying to cuff him. A surge of impatience goes up my back and into my hair, and I try to go low, which is a mistake because it turns out he’s one of those extra-physical types and he clubs his hands down on the back of my head, and after I’m on the ground his right knee bangs the side of my head, and then he’s on top and gets control just long enough for the two points, but the thing about the extra-physical types is it’s usually a cover for a lack of skill, and you learn how to deal with it just like anything else, so I push, shoulders against his thighs for leverage, and my knees are off the ground while he digs his hard parts into my soft spots. He’s scrambling to get behind me, but I’m standing by now and batting his hand away from my stomach. I’m away from him for my one point. Whistle.