Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  “How much?”

  “Two thousand dollars.”

  He’s of the age where he looks over the top of his reading glasses at all distant objects. Everything is skeptical to him, being skeptical’s what got him all this mahogany. “You know, I’ve met Lorraine. She’s an irresponsible person. The car she used to drive had one green door and three brown ones. She carries things in plastic bags. Always has been, always will be.” He touches the paper with his pen. “This money is likely never getting returned to you.”

  “I know,” I lie, but then I see he’s right, and then I’m mad, but then I realize I don’t care, I don’t care about money flushed down the toilet, I don’t care about money in flames.

  “How’s the season going?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  On my way out, I take five pillow mints from the secretary’s desk and suck them into oblivion and, relieved to finally have one thing settled, forget Aunt Lorraine, who’s probably covered in lies.

  The two other classes happen but I wasn’t paying attention. I skip one to swim.

  I’m going to miss the next two duals and a double. Four matches down the drain. I’m attempting to reset my mind-set, reset my thinking toward the match after them, because there are only five left after this block I’m missing, five total matches until postseason. This is what I get for thinking I could cut the corner on all this, have the 133 handed back to me. But the difficulty of this test is not something to grieve about, it’s something to be thankful for.

  I walk into the student union just in time to catch the last ten minutes of Old Yeller.

  I watch two sparrows hop around a parking lot trying to have sex.

  I smear myself all over the inside of my room.

  They scheduled the Sheridan-Huron meet in the middle of the afternoon. On my way out, the familiar female at the front desk hands me a letter on official Oregsburg letterhead. I thank the female, who has been at the desk for at least two years and obviously knows my identity. They make you sign in and out at the front desk if it’s after midnight. I’ve been writing Steven Forster in there for all four years just to see if they’d say something but they haven’t.

  The letter says I have a meeting with a doctor, a therapist doctor, on February 15. The words “as requested by you” are in there. At the end, the letter apologizes for taking so long to schedule an appointment, and then it’s signed by Dr. Cynthia Barnes.

  No days off. So before anyone arrives, I go into the weight room for an hour and then I go back home. I shower for a preposterous period of time. A team meeting is scheduled for 1:00 p.m. and I take my time walking to the gym, very slowly, with the goal being to get there with my eyes shut. It’s not like it’s hard, it’s a straight line. About halfway, I hear a female crying so I open my eyes. She’s near the bottom of Finch’s steps, repeatedly attempting to pull an aluminum handcart stacked high with boxes up the flight. She’s on the second step. Her kind of crying is the mouth-open kind. When the top box slides off and bangs to the ground, whatever’s inside breaks. She wails, looks around for help, but there’s only me. She watches me expectantly, sniffles, and blinks. I start walking again toward the gym with a limping leg. I point in the direction I’m going, which is away from her. “Sorry, doctor’s orders,” I say.

  I pace around the locker room. I can see myself, as if from afar, as if I was a nasty fly on the wall, waiting for the coaches. When they all come in, I put on a big show of being involved, nodding and laughing at things I don’t even hear, jumping in place. Fink tells everyone that Hargraves isn’t going to make it. While he’s talking, I make sure to stand right in his line of vision, front and center. I get in the middle of the huddle and bark and shout with the rest of them, louder, pushing and punching, part of the team. I run out with them, I clap and scream myself hoarse for every one of their matches, even Linus’s, even Kryger’s, give them towels and do push-ups with them to get their heartbeats up. I stand right next to Fink the whole meet, degrading myself for my need but I don’t mind because need is always degrading.

  Afterwards, back in the locker room, Fink gives a short speech saying that even though Linus and Kryger and Harry were the only ones that won their matches, he liked the heart they all showed. During the speech, I say things out loud like “that’s right” and “next time” and “yep.” Fink lets them all go, and I hang around while he talks with Eerik and Farrow, pretending to tie my shoes. He writes something in the green notebook he’s always carrying around, then puts it into his gym bag, slinging the bag over his shoulder and heading out into the hallway. I’m right behind.

  “Coach, wait up.”

  “Florida. You were very helpful today.”

  “I just had the mentality that, if I’m going to sit out, I can help my team in other ways.” Like a chimp, I grin when anxious.

  He puts a Twins hat on. He’s looking through his bag. “Glad to hear you’re enjoying your new role.”

  “Coach, with all due respect—”

  “Damn it, where are my keys?”

  “With all respect—”

  “Look, Florida. I know what you’re doing. It’s high up on the pathetic scale and really, I’m a little embarrassed. I swear I put them in the front—”

  “With all the respect in the world—”

  “Hargraves and the rest of us have been all on the same page with regard to your injured status. Which is wait and see. So let’s wait and see.”

  We’re at the end of the hallway. He’s putting his gloves on. “With all due respect, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  Fink stops, looks right at me. “Take your hand off my arm. Right now.” I do, thinking it’ll finally give me an answer. But he just does that mouth-clicking thing, the one mothers do when they’re disappointed in the youth, and zips up his coat. “You’re the most tone-deaf person I’ve ever met.”

  He pushes open the door, makes prints in the parking lot snow. I’m learning that Hargraves listens to Fink. I’m learning that Fink will be head coach of Oregsburg when Hargraves hangs it up. I’m learning that Fink is smart.

  Watch me put all this shit back together.

  I stop by Finch to get any notes I missed from Geography, and Mr. Gorman tells me to “just read the first half of chapter one and you’ll be fine.” At the music department, they tell me that Silas doesn’t have an office.

  At the library I check out two books: The Encyclopedia of Jazz and a giant book on crime.

  I head back to McCloskey, through the lobby and up the stairs, and before I know what I’m doing I’m walking down the hall to Linus’s door and I knock, or maybe I don’t, but I definitely try the doorknob. It’s locked. While standing there breathing on the door I swear that I hear someone shushing and someone laughing. I don’t try my luck, I’ve run clean out of luck to try.

  At Oakes Elementary, I tortured myself getting other kids’ attention, pulling the fire alarm and running away, holding down the flusher on the toilet until it overflowed, wasting most of a roll of paper towels by stuffing them into my shirt to imitate a pregnant woman, and for this and generally clowning around with equipment like markers and glitter, I would get kicked out into the hall two or three times a week, and I would walk the hallways whistling like a vagrant. I think my mom was especially worried about me, but the truth is someone always wanted to tell me about my attitude. Mostly I remember being bored, being disturbed by boredom, and I would do anything to get out of sitting where I was told to sit. Mostly, I remember wanting to get outside to play with Bird.

  I was friends for the first five years of school with Frank K. Bird. He was my best friend, the tallest kid in our class, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux (he made me write it over and over until I figured out how to spell it) who needed glasses at five, who found out he needed glasses because he one day told his mom the colors on The Jetsons were bleedy.

  Do people remember how friendships as old as kindergarten begin? I don’t. I only remember jumping off the high met
al bars with Bird, acting like I smashed my head against the loud aluminum slide and throwing mulch at kids to make Bird laugh, Bird sighing all the time and wiping his glasses on his shirt, I had the applesauce brains of a child but no one could make me laugh like Bird did, he would call anyone “Triar Fuck” and got sent home at least twice for it, at lunch he sculpted boobs with mashed potatoes and two wrinkled peas as the nipples, when we were on the same team in dodgeball he’d guard my side and I would run at them because I could throw harder than anyone else and was full of directionless anger, Bird got sent to the principal’s office when his project for the imaginary plant project was a Penis Plant, I remember taking the bus to school hoping he wasn’t sick, I didn’t care if any of the other kids were there except him. We put M-80s in buckets of water and then did a few mailboxes and learned the valuable lesson of quitting while you’re ahead. We’d throw things on roofs and beat the hell out of each other until one of our noses bled, we’d have gibberish conversations that we said were Italian, we’d break windows with sticks, this was in the time when I always needed Band-Aids, we chewed a few sacks of gum and crammed the whole yellow gob into a drainpipe behind the post office, his mom tried to teach us Mille Bornes but we didn’t want to learn how to play Mille Bornes, we cut open a pillow, we’d have Jujubes-eating contests, we’d watch The Smurfs and Touché Turtle and Dum Dum and Yogi Bear and Deputy Dawg for hours and press our wide-open eyeballs against the colors of the television to see what would happen and eat Kraft and drink grape and orange soda mixed together, we called it “a cocktail” and pretended we were drunk and high society and had big, sad problems, we’d yell cusses into echoing empty halls, Bird’s dad stopped us when we tried to put their unused Twister mat in the oven, we’d find empty bottles by the road and smash them against rocks, we’d slap each other in the face with our gloves and say “I challenge you to a duel,” we found a bunch of discarded termited wood and placed it against the side of Bird’s barn and shot it a thousand times with pellet guns, we took apart an Etch-a-Sketch and when we saw its secret we were disappointed and shook all the powder out and broke the frame, I had to get in a fight with a boy named Grady because he called me “Dickstein Perez,” and when he was on the ground Bird kicked him and I punched his head (do you know that when you hit someone hard enough in the head their hands will open, as if letting go?), and for this we both got suspended, three days for me and two for him, and during the whole first two days we leaned sticks together in the woods and played Fort Sumter, and on the third day I went back by myself and tried to play again but it wasn’t the same. I remember Bird sighing a lot, sighing all the time, asking him if something was wrong, him shaking his head, me learning to just sit there with him and stop asking stupid questions that had no answers.

  When we were nine, we made an official pact, contract handwriting on paper and everything. The pact was this: when he turned fifty, I would travel to wherever he lived and kill him. He didn’t want to live to be older than that. When you’re nine, fifty seems like a long time away, and he could see no point in living past that, that was enough. I remember being sure I understood why he felt this way, but I probably didn’t, I was nine, and he was only four weeks older than me but he would go into these long silences and just put his head down. We decided on a gun, that I’d ring his doorbell and put the gun right to his forehead and end it for him for good, because that would be quickest. I remember him making me feel like I was agreeing to do him the deepest kindness, that he wouldn’t think about asking anyone else to do this for him, that only I understood. I tried very hard to imagine his reasons, to figure out his reasons. And I remember thinking that if he asked me if I wanted him to do the same, even though that was impossible, I would’ve said yes. But he didn’t.

  Of course this was never going to happen, I would’ve gone away for murder if I did what I’d promised. This was not a time of logic, no friendship worth anything is logical to the outside world, plus I was only nine and Bird was in pain.

  And then a few months later, during the summer, he was gone. Something happened with Bird, but I didn’t know what. His dad wanted to move them closer to the reservation, the one Bird had shown me that looked like a shark tooth in the extreme top right of the South Dakota map. It happened so fast I didn’t think to get an address to write him. You don’t think about things like that when you’re nine. I hung on to the contract for a while, then threw it away because I couldn’t read it without crying. And so I returned to the normal state of not having any friends. A few years after Bird left, I got bored of running around by myself, and I became a wrestler. There was nothing else to do, so I became a wrestler.

  And I guess for a while I was like the other young males until I wasn’t. After Bird left, I quit all that. The time between his leaving and when I started wrestling is a total blank. Like I said, I have problems with my memory. But after that, once I’d moved in with Grandma in Hillsboro, I stopped stupidly veering around so much. “You are being too stern, you’re too stern for a boy your age,” she said over and over when I got through dinner without speaking. I didn’t like to talk anymore, every time I had to give a school presentation, I was corrected and told to look up when speaking, being serious was the only way I could see to handle it.

  I kept wrestling. And then I got older. Over the summers in high school, I would lift and practice with some other kids on the team and jog around town at night. During the days, I worked for the husband of my mom’s friend Mrs. Tomasi. He ran a pesticide company, a white warehouse that had a permanent chemical stench that got inside your nose as you drove up the gravel drive, and I spent my days loading his red pickup full of pesticides, drums and jugs of it, and after I got my license, I’d drive them out to farmers and gardeners. Abamectin was for the potato psyllid and you couldn’t let livestock anywhere near it, we stocked imidacloprid and dinotefuran, which were disguised in big white bottles under names like Cavalry and AntiTidal, we had different poisons for the aphids and the cutworms. I’d map my routes and it’d take all day, and I’d drive back with the windows down, the sweat stuck on my face, and I’d get paid in cash. At night, when I practiced, even after changing clothes, I could still smell the chemicals. The other kids on the team would make me wash my hands twice, they didn’t want my dirty hands touching them. And even after we were done and I’d finally had a chance to shower, I’d get under the covers, the lights off, and I’d still feel like there were chemicals on my skin, like I’d dragged them into bed with me. Then I’d fall asleep and do it all over again.

  What are my reasons? Bird had his reasons, everyone has to have their reasons. I have my reasons. Until Mary Beth, no one ever asked me to explain myself.

  Orange vans containing Aberdeen College wrestlers drive into the gym parking lot and let them out. They have orange singlets and orange headgear, and some bit of time later, I watch Linus start his second period on top and immediately, robotically, put one of them through a suffocating crossface and pin him for good. I eat more dirt. I keep eating the dirt. I imagine getting Joseph Carver on his back and straddling his face-up body and gripping my left hand to the horseshoe of his jaw and yanking it open like a cash register. I am not sleeping when I have this thought, but it feels as if I must be.

  I dream that I was forced to dance with Linus at the fiesta. In this dance, I was the woman.

  I drag myself out of bed. I drag my dread around with me everywhere like a dog on a leash. She tried to tell me when we were on the hill spying on the wife-arsonist that I shouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket. It’s a lesson I should’ve learned a long time ago, that I’m trying to learn, and that I think I’m finally, after all, figuring out.

  Now I take my lessons to heart and with that in mind, I go right up to Hargraves, who finally has returned to practice and is the person I need to talk to to iron this whole misunderstanding out.

  “What did Fink say?” Hargraves says.

  “He said to ask you.”

  Hargraves looks
at me, which I interpret as a prompt for elaboration.

  “Because you’re the coach,” I say. “You’re the one in charge.”

  “When’s the last time he looked at your knee?”

  “A month ago,” I say with too much excitement, but he doesn’t seem to hear.

  “Have him take a good, close look at it. I gotta start this fucking bitch.” And then he puts the whistle in his mouth and practice begins.

  Fink is supine on the bleachers with an apple. He doesn’t stop eating it when I approach.

  “Coach Fink, what is your first name?” I would like to fling a harmful powder in his eyes.

  “You know what my first name is, Stephen. It’s Roland.”

  “That is a terrible name. Roland Fink, I’m going to need you to stop fucking things up and just generally shitting all over the place.” He smiles, and the rage becomes more red, or redder, a full-blown outrageous negative emotion, and he waits for me to say it, to say what I’m going to say, and I say, “I hope you choke to death in front of your kids and your wife tries to stop you from dying in front of your kids but you die anyway.”

  Fink’s smile, if it’s possible, gets larger, gets circus large, gets larger than his face. “Bike, Florida.”

  I’m profoundly confused!

  Hargraves whistles practice dead in the middle of the live-gos and stalks straight through the bodies to Ucher. He stands over him, breathing hard through his nose, his dewlap shaking with fury. Ucher’s weight fluctuates like an insecure teenager’s based on what Hargraves needs, in his five years he’s wrestled at 157 and 197 and the classes in between. A plaything for Hargraves’s whims, I’ve seen him choke down fourteen pounds in two weeks and lose double that a month later. Ucher has a wife and a kid, he likes to hunt and fish when he wants to, a lot of the time at the cost of practicing, at the cost of getting better, which Hargraves definitely knows. He already has a foot out the door, if he ever had one in. Everyone likes Ucher, he doesn’t bother anyone. He’s only a year older than me but he feels like the whole team’s relaxed older brother, one of those people that makes everyone in a room more comfortable just by being in it.