Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  From my mouth, where I don’t have time to carefully stack the words up to make these thoughts, I say, “You smell good.”

  “I like how you smell, too.”

  “You’re a lot smarter and better looking than me. You must know that.”

  “Flattery!” she says. “I like talking to you. And I like looking at you.”

  “Nah,” I say. “I got these ears.”

  She rubs my head and her fingers gently move down to my ears, the space behind. “I know.”

  IN THE LOCKER ROOM AFTER PRACTICE, Linus shows me a note from his mom. It’s a tear sheet from a pad you stick on your refrigerator.

  Dear Linus,

  Terry and Lynn are doing good. Terry spends weekends shooting his potato gun and Lynn runs out into the fields with Dad’s surveyor wheel to measure. He keeps tinkering with it, he’s trying to beat his record, which is 120 meters. Dad is talking about you a lot, he likes to talk to Bill and Jenny and Curtis about you. How are your classes? Seems like every year there’s more to do, I’m vacuuming nearly every day! Give your deodorant stick to Stephen if he needs some. We have extra sticks here and can send more because the Right Shop had them three for two.

  Dad and Mom.

  He says, “My parents say they’ll come to the championship if I make it. In Kenosha.”

  “You’re going to make it to Kenosha.”

  “They want to meet you. It’ll make my mom feel good to send you the deodorant.”

  I give him the note back. “Tell her thank you.” I have this quick, exciting vision of Masha sensuously rubbing up on her vacuum cleaner. Then in jumps Mary Beth, replacing Masha and putting the vacuum to venereal use.

  In the hallway, Linus puts his hand on my elbow to get my real attention, and says, “Stephen. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s sort of a weird question.”

  “O.K.”

  “You’re going to think I’m stupid. It’s really stupid.”

  “Ask it.”

  “You have to promise not to laugh.”

  “O.K.”

  “I’m serious. Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “O.K. Do girls pee out of their butts?”

  The first week of practice a few months ago, on a furlough night, we found Jaws on in the student union. It ended at two in the morning and we walked the ten minutes back to McCloskey yelling “Farewell and Adieu to You, Fair Spanish Ladies,” which we didn’t really know the words to.

  We join the rest of the team for Thanksgiving in the conference room, down the hall from the locker room. It’s been snowing all day, but there are no windows in here. It smells like poor food and is filled with hot air. Eerik’s wife and Lee’s wife stand off to the side with their arms crossed and mumbling to each other, possibly taking erotic pleasure from watching us put their food in our mouths. The two long tables are covered with big disposable plastic sheets, which are festive orange. Some of us are still sweating from practice, and we’re all tired.

  Nine days until Joseph Carver. In my pocket, I have a folded-up paper about him. He wrestles for Konstantin, he’s 3–1. This isn’t much to go on, but it’s a start. My imagination figures up his family, his dinner table, his dog begging for scraps. Has he forgotten about me? I’m biting my turkey meat, just gnawing around on it. I am something that’s always there but you forget. Like eyelids.

  “Dude, if you ever wanna see what you’d look like fat just go like this.” Ellis hunches his whole body forward and smushes his chin to his chest.

  Sherman, next to him, says, “Dude, it doesn’t really work for you. You have no jaw.”

  “Yeah, I have a small jawline.”

  “What’s a jawline?”

  “It’s, you know, your jaw,” Ellis says. “Show them what fat looks like, Fenry.” Down at the end of the table, Fat Henry puts part of a roll into his mouth, squishes his chin down, and both tables cheer.

  The coaches have their own table in the corner. They get sirloin. Later, they get to go home to houses where their children and wives are waiting to be with them, because our meal is in the early afternoon and so it’s mainly a solidarity thing for our sake. I haven’t ever made a point of sorting out their family situations, which ones are happy and how much. How I am has made them back off. For the rest of the team, they are there mostly to keep you committed and to make you inconsiderably better, maybe adding a win or two to their totals. I don’t need them for that anymore. I just need them to medically clear me (Fink’s job) and count my reps in practice (Whiting) and drive me to my matches (Eerik’s job). That kind of thing.

  There’s a pitiful cornucopia on each table. Nate keeps doing lewd things with a gourd and laughing about it.

  My boredom gets thicker. I don’t want to be here. I pick a booger out and wipe it on Whitey’s nub. “What are you touching on me for, Florida?” He suspiciously rubs his back. I take the last broccoli stalk from my plate and put it into my mouth. I wash it down with one of my two allotted cups of skim milk, thinking of the tits on the cow it came from, a cow kept alive for its useful tits. Big meaty thick ones. Flapping around in the breeze.

  Lyle says, “I saw this show where all these young people were riding polo ponies around and playing.”

  “They could do that?” Sherman says.

  “Could do what? Who?”

  “Be ridden. The horses.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Sherman, that’s what polo is.”

  “I thought that’s what fucks your legs up.”

  “You are retarded because that’s polio.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Across the table, Kryger is glaring at me. I wait for him to say something. I’m thankful for any excitement.

  The girl, the painter, is still with Whitey, and he shares their games with the table. “She had me play this intimate game. She stood on the other side of the door, I could hear her taking her clothes off, and she said, ‘Guess which part of my body I’m smacking.’ It was so erotic.”

  One of the least palatable aspects of wrestling is the pace. It begins in November and ends in March, and you’re wrestling twenty or so times a season. You get roughly four matches a month, but that’s not even really true because you get these unbearable breaks for Christmas and around postseason. Much of the season is a waiting room, pining over your schedule, dictated by faceless schedule-makers who sit around fatly and decide to make me wait, the gunk accumulating in my organs. The gunk is like an egg that needs to be laid regularly, I don’t know what to do with it all. The secret of wrestling is that it’s really about self-management.

  Every day, I look forward to practice, to the miniature fights they give me like conjugal visits, where I’m temporarily allowed to release myself until I’m told to ease up, lay off, cool it. I breathe faster for the entire practice, and for the half hours before and after. But it’s not enough, it’s never enough. And just like that, when I’m putting my clothes on after the shower, I begin measuring the time to the next time, because my gunk begins molding up faster than anyone else’s. If I had my way I’d wrestle every day and the season would be four hundred matches long.

  Linus, who’s next to me, keeps lifting open The Stand in his lap and sneaking sentences.

  Two pairs have been lumped together permanently on the team: the Raiskin brothers, Jerry and Tom, who clearly have at least one parent who enjoys making a joke of things, and William Belcher and William van Ness, who have no blood relation and don’t even look similar, but one looks really old and the other doesn’t, so they’re called Young William and Elder William. The four of them are sitting together at the end of my table, and Ellis, noticing, points and asks if they’ve ever felt compelled to play doubles tennis, or ride two-seater bikes or teeter-totters for amusement or use one of those long saws that requires two people to cut down big trees.

  I bite off the strip of skin that folds along the nail on my left middle finger. It takes about thirty seconds
for the blood to trace an outline of the nail. I put it in my mouth and suck the jam out, but it keeps coming back. It won’t stop bleeding, so I let it get deeper around the rim, and when it’s finally sticky enough it stops.

  “It’s like, have you noticed that the number seven looks like a question mark?” Reuben says to Lowe, who nods.

  I look at Simon licking his dinner roll before taking a bite out of it. I think he’s majoring in accounting. He licks all the way around the roll, really luxuriating in it. I have nothing against him, but his life is not mine, it’s a fart of a life. I couldn’t be trained to care about someone else’s money. That is Simon Fjelstad’s unremarkable life, four decades of reading what comes up on a number machine, a grain thresher at the end summoning you through it.

  Finally, Kryger says what he’s going to say, which is, “Fuck you, Florida! You dislocated my finger!” Because the finger in question is his pointer, he is able to use it to accuse me. There’s a black splint taped on, like a resting caterpillar.

  “Dessert now, boys!” The wives walk trays around. Everyone gets a half cup of pineapple.

  “I didn’t dislocate your finger,” I say, sucking the last of my mashed potatoes into my body.

  “Then who the fuck did, fancyboy?”

  Linus is wiping his mouth over and over.

  “Don’t get, what do you call it, contentious.” I smack my lips. “If you want to be technical about it, what happened was your finger got between your body and the mat. So if you want to take it up with someone, I’d blame your own torso. Or go talk to the mat. Or your finger for desiring to bend the wrong way. In logic, the last person to blame would be me.” I taste one pineapple, which is neither pinecone nor apple but is delicious and sweet and cold. “All I did was show everyone who you are. Which is a lazy loser. You’re a lazy loser that I’ll always beat. Next time I’ll break your other fucking finger.”

  Suddenly, Kryger’s attention shifts to my left, to Linus. “You going to just sit there and read, faggot?” Kryger throws a piece of broccoli and it hits Linus in the face. He picks up another piece, looks at me, and says, “Fuck your dead mother, and fuck your faggot boyfriend.”

  It’s like there’s no table between us, it’s like there’s no one else in the room. That’s how quickly I’m on him. How quickly his chair is knocked over and my right hand is prying open his big mouth. That’s how quickly I get my half cup of pineapple rammed into his mouth, the rim of the cheap plastic cup cutting his lips, which are chapped and ready for bleeding nice. Snot comes out of my nose. “I insist,” I say. “I insist.” He puts his hands up while I hit his face. He makes a noise. That is that. That is that. They get to me about then, but not before I get a wad of spit into his eye.

  I’m dragged outside, and when I can see straight again, I’m in the hallway with Coach Fink grabbing my sweatshirt. The door opens and Linus pokes his head out, but Fink says, “Go back inside,” which Linus does.

  When we’re all the way down by the inoperative water fountain, he says, “Florida, what big teeth you have.” His idea appears to be to hold on to me like a leashed dog until it’s clear I’ve settled down.

  “When did your hands get so strong, Coach?” I say. “Put me down.”

  “Are you calm?”

  “Yes.”

  He lets go but correctly intuits that he needs to stand between me and the room that has Kryger in it, because newly freed I have another sudden longing to rush back in and further deface his head.

  Fink says, “You’ve got some like crying there in your eye.”

  “I’m not upset,” I say. He laughs. His laugh is just awful. I wonder if he spent his whole life making it so awful.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.” I realize that though I’m a good liar with my mouth, I’m a bad liar with my face, which can’t hide a thing. There’s a steady, insistent drip of water coming from somewhere nearby.

  “You’re angry, Florida. Not just now. In practice, in matches, after matches, during team dinners. Last year I saw you kick the handle off a faucet in the St. Gregory bathroom.”

  “Because that was after the fucking Frazier match.”

  “I saw you, same location, rip out one of the van’s seatbelts.”

  “I had him. If the period was fifteen seconds longer, I had him.”

  Drip. “I know.”

  “So what if I’m fucking angry? I’m the best wrestler Oregsburg’s ever had.”

  Drip. “You and Linus, yes, maybe.” The dripping becomes a predictable noise, which I begin to identify with the face of Fink, which I find unpleasant.

  “Maybe?”

  “I know you’re very ambitious. I know you’ve done a lot with a little.”

  “Do you even know anything about me? You don’t give a shit. I had no other scholarships. I’m the only one left besides Linus that hasn’t lost this season. No one’s had 133 but me for three years. I built my fucking house on 133.”

  “There are ways to shape your inside problems so they may benefit you,” Fink says.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “For instance, the monastics, the Buddhists, they’ll take a vow of silence.”

  “You can do that? Why?”

  “A lot of reasons. It’s a spiritual thing.”

  “What’s the longest vow of silence ever?”

  “I don’t know, smart-ass.” Increasingly, I know that his position as my coach is preventing something malicious on his part from entering this conversation. A snap character judgment is that Fink is bad at keeping the real Fink side turned facedown. So, of course, I will keep pushing. “Some people go more than ten years. There are vows of celibacy, vows of poverty, vows of obedience.”

  “I’m already doing those. I didn’t know there was a name for them. I don’t think I need any more ideas, thank you.”

  “Keep your fucking head on, Florida. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Where else would I keep it?”

  “You should refresh that noggin of yours. The mind is the fruit.” Here, in a vulgar gesture, he makes his hairy square middle finger stick out and pokes my temple hard, twice. Old-man strength, which is really just the fibrous iron strength of the fingers, is a result of lifelong handgrip use and masturbation. “Kicking apart bathrooms and attacking your teammates isn’t sustainable. And that’s only what I’ve seen, who knows what debauched shit you do unsupervised. It’s probably disgusting. You’re lucky you’re talented enough to still win while on the side you veer off and do all this negligent, perverted nonsense. I’ve seen your type before. I can tell you how it ends. You’re going to flame out. Or get caught. You’re going to do something you regret.”

  “I don’t regret anything that gets me what I want.”

  “I guarantee, if you keep up like this, you’re going to lose.”

  “At the end of the year, when I win at Kenosha, I’m going to remind you you said that.”

  “You’re living in laws made up in your own head. You’re by far the biggest deviant I’ve ever coached.” He’s making no effort to soften the spray of spit on his consonants, much of which lands on my face and neck. “You have no attention for what’s outside yourself. There are laws, and you’re never going to get ‘what you want’ unless you stop being a solipsistic mess. Let me give you an example. To draw the man on the bench, first you must draw the empty bench.”

  “What is that? Some Zen parable?”

  “Why do you speak in such short, autistic sentences?” I’ve never met someone who talks so easily. If you really pay attention, you can see that he takes a small breath before starting up, but other than that, it’s like there’s no trying, like he’s unrolling a roll of toilet paper out of his mouth, along the floor. “Let me tell you a story. Where I grew up in Idaho, there was a prehistoric animal and cryptozoology park. For the kids. It was called Big Scary Monster World. You’d see little boys in their shorts climbing into the open mouths of huge fake crocodi
les, playing with the hard rubber teeth—”

  But before he can launch into whatever lesson that was going to turn into, I yawn aggressively. “That’s nice,” I say. I wonder how much of Mary Beth I can fit in my mouth. “What is the main takeaway of this hallway encounter, would you say?”

  “You don’t listen very well.”

  “Look, Coach. Let’s finish this up like friends. I appreciate you checking our physical charts, supplying finger splints for teammates who think they can beat me, that kind of thing. I’m calm now. Your parables did the trick. Can I go?”

  Drip. “I think you should stay away from the rest of the team for today.” Drip.

  “Was going to anyway.”

  “See you for drills, Florida.”

  “Keep up the good work, Coach.”

  When I get away from him, I wipe off the globs of his spit from my face.

  It’s fucking snowing outside. It covers everything, the roofs, the cars, the bushes, the sidewalks, the dirt, the lightposts, steadily and thoroughly, like the smothering pillow over a deathbedder’s face. Students skate a few feet for fun on the ice, some fall, it gets on their hats and shoulders and they don’t wipe it off.

  There’s no one in the student union, but through the plate glass the TV goes, something on the other side, activated, a fish-tank spookiness. No one at the career center, no one in the health center, no one in Grunwald Auditorium. I’m going to make it nine days to my next match without saying one more word. Vow of silence, vow of doubtlessness. Vow of poking Fink’s eyeballs out, knocking them against each other like big wet cherries. There’s no one in the pointless Petrusse Art Museum, where Mary Beth works the front desk, where she’s told me they make up those little backstory cards, the ones they put next to the art telling you conception nuggets. She told me she extemporized one that read: “The ‘monk’ seen pensively walking the dunes in Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (left, in oil-on-canvas reprint) is actually no monk at all! He is Noel Friedrich, the bastard agnosic brother of Caspar. Friedrich often took his younger brother Noel out for air along the cliffs at Rügen between 1804 and 1808, until Noel himself died in the very same deep depicted in the painting, drowned when he mistook the waters for the town square. It is thought that The Monk by the Sea is the most personal of Friedrich’s paintings for this reason.” That one was my favorite.