Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  “I wish just one week would pass without having to see you do that turtle lock-up thing you do. I swear to God, you’ve done it so many times it’s like you’re practicing it, like it’s your trademark or some fuckshit. When’s the last time you didn’t do that in a match?” He kicks Ucher, who’s on his back but has his hands up. “I asked you a question.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know. You don’t know! When your opponent’s on top of you, he’s trying to push you forward. That means what? What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It means you get up. You explode on the whistle and get up, motherfucker. Get in bottom position. Get in bottom right now.” Ucher rolls over and does so. Hargraves gets on top of him. He blows the whistle. Ucher tries to stand, but Hargraves shoves down on him and Ucher hits the mat face-first. “This is exactly why you’re never going to be anything but what you were. You’re as good as you were when you were in high school. You’re locking up against freshmen. You’re no better. How does it feel? I liked you better when you were fat, then I knew why you didn’t work hard. Again.” They get back in position, the whistle blows. Hargraves, wheezing, can barely keep Ucher from getting out, he’s locking his hands around Ucher but Ucher says nothing. “Show me you can work hard one time before you leave. Show me right now!” Ucher turns and smashes the bulb of his elbow into Hargraves’s mouth, producing a deep, thick thud. “Again!” They get back in position, Hargraves puts his ear against Ucher’s shoulder blade and when he blows the whistle, blood sprinkles out onto Ucher’s shirt. Ucher waits for Hargraves to get tired, and again turns and elbows Hargraves in the mouth. “Again!” He spits and they reset. Blood gets on the front of Hargraves’s shirt and the mat. Ucher elbows him in his mouth again, harder than the other times, and when he does, Hargraves stumbles back, sways on his feet. Then, slowly, he lifts his hand and points to the corner of the gym, at the mop and the white jug of disinfectant. “Clean the mats,” he says, turning to everyone else, “practice is over.” Then he walks out of the gym. No one leaves for a few minutes, and I don’t even bother chasing after him to further explain the Fink situation, I just finish my interval, staring down at my black and purple and red and blue finger.

  None of the coaches are in the locker room. Only the rest of the team, Lyle spitting his muck in the trash can, ice bags on his shoulders, pretending to listen to Clark, who’s attempting to explain the concept of either epistemology or eschatology, Ellis eating a banana extremely slowly, Whitey with his shirt off picking his back nubs, making the same gonorrhea joke he always makes.

  As a last-ditch effort to find a coach to whine to, I stop by the training room. The window shade is down on the COACH OFFICE door that is, upon testing, locked. I give up for the day.

  Parked in the lot, its nose aimed at the gym door, is Ucher’s red truck. Snow meanders down, and the wipers are on the lowest pace. Ucher’s sitting inside, and he’s looking right at me. I figure it’s not possible to pretend I haven’t seen him, so I start over there. It’s only when I’m alongside that I realize he’s staring straight ahead, into what the behavioral scientists proclaim the middle distance. I knock.

  He rolls down his window. “Hi, Florida.” There’s a beer in a cozy in his lap.

  “Hi. How’s your elbow?”

  He flicks the headlights on and off. “Why don’t you get in? Got something to tell you.”

  I go around the other side, shut the door behind me.

  “Heidi’s pregnant again. That’s not what I wanted to tell you.”

  “Well, congratulations.”

  “She’s coming soon. A summer baby.” Ucher has careless long hair that he scratches often. “We found out the sex. Girl again.”

  Ucher tells me a story from before any of us were here. “I don’t know why I waited so long to tell you this, and what’s weird is I probably never would’ve told you if you hadn’t knocked on my window. Life’s funny. My first year here, which would’ve been the year before you got here, I had a pretty rough go of it. Which is why, what happened in there? Doesn’t mean a thing. Not a goddamn thing. I was already working at Briscoe, doing the service rounds, what I mean is I was filling up the vending machines all over this part of town. Driving all over.

  “The point is, I say all this to say that in that year’s December Hargraves found out he had lung cancer. It was going to kill him in six months, or it was supposed to but it didn’t. Because he got the lobectomy? He got the lobectomy in time. They cut his chest open and cut out the cancer part in his lung. The doctors x-rayed him again but lost it. They weren’t sure they got it. All this happened over about a month, him finding out and then getting the surgery and then finding out they couldn’t find it. They thought they got it out, but they were saying, basically, we’re not sure, we can’t ever be sure. Anyway.” He flicks the can top, flicks it three times, which generates the distinct metal twang. “Anyway, that weekend we had a dual. And so the day before, Hargraves gathers us all in the locker room to tell us a big secret he has. We’re all dead from practice. He takes a piece of yellow chalk and draws a spiral on the board. And then what happens is he gets to talking about all types of bizarre shit, I’m talking Kabbalah, I’m talking different ideas on morality, I remember he kept saying ‘prehistoric’ over and over. And then I think about, ah, ten minutes later, he finally arrives at his main point, which at this part he pulls out a marker from his pocket and then started drawing all kinds of circles and spirals on his face, his whole face. Which I suppose was to illustrate that he’s going to have the whole team hypnotized so we can focus better. He was going to bring in a hypnotizing doctor. That was it.”

  “And did he?”

  “Hypnotize us? No, no one ever mentioned that again. He never called any doctor. There was no goddamn doctor. By all appearances he goes back to being himself after that. But every now and then something like this happens.” He gestures toward the gym with the can. “Like this elbow shit. Crazed things come out of a crazed factory. Someone living with something that can kill you. Whenever it feels like. Maybe. You never know.”

  Come to think of it, I recall the time two seasons ago when we were all in the locker room smelling something weird and in trying to find the source, Flores found a dead, wet lobster in Hargraves’s gym bag, under his clothes. At a match last year in Montana, I went into a stall after him and there was urine just all over the seat. And then, while Ucher finishes his beer, I remember the first time I felt something was wrong, my first season here. Hargraves doesn’t do this anymore, he’s gone bowlegged like an old dog, but the one time in practice, four years ago, when he showed me just how hard I have to wrestle if I want to dominate, I felt deep dismay in his bones. And I saw as if through different eyes Hargraves’s old-man skeleton, devoid of cartilage, covered with calcium clusters.

  “You want a ride home? I gotta get going.”

  “It’s O.K., I’ll walk.”

  “Too late, I’m going. Which place’s yours?”

  “McCloskey.”

  He drives without turn signals. The snow is coming down hard enough that I worry about how fast he’s driving, but he has two children, so I say nothing. Last year, when without warning Sawicki quit the team, leaving a blank at 165, Hargraves had no better option than to command Ucher to quit eating and slip down a class to fill the spot. Which Ucher did, though he did not excel in his new place. But it never ended up mattering, no one expected anything else, who even had their head turned in the right direction?

  “You’re gonna be all set for postseason?”

  “Don’t really know.”

  “I hope so. You take this too seriously for it to not work out.”

  January is for two-a-days. So I make a habit of doing a real practice after my sham practice, after everyone’s left I come out from my hiding place in the bathroom and do it for real.

  Under the snow in the Honky Tonky parking lot, I find a card for a phone number called 1-900-AZZ-TIT
Z. I get a woman named Topaz on the phone who tells me to have my credit card and my dick ready. I hang up.

  The whole ride to LaMoure I lie down on top of the bags in the back of the van instead of like an upright normal person. No one comments, I just flop around back there whenever the suspension shifts. I gargle discontent. I pretend I’ve been shot in the head. As we’re walking out of the locker room to enter the gym, I tell Ucher to tell them that I’m going to the bathroom. I don’t know why I bother.

  I head outside and run for a very long time. So long that I lose track of time, so long that I realize I might not make it back to the gym in time for the vans, so long that it gets dark again and I hope they leave without me, that I’ll have an excuse to be stuck here, long enough that the anger I started with comes out of my body, and I run slower, not thinking anything in particular, taking unplanned turns, not thinking anything at all.

  I get back to the parking lot as they’re shoving their bags in the vans, and I pretend like I’ve been there the whole time but clearly no one buys it.

  In my bedroom that night I have to masturbate because I keep hearing the sexuality of Topaz’s voice in my ears, I flog myself until I get the shame out of my system. I barely get an erection. And then while trying to fall asleep, in the distrustful middle consciousness, I imagine that at Fink’s house he invites my enemies over for dinner. A real fucking feast. Because I don’t know where Fink lives or what his house looks like, it somehow becomes more believable and frightening. He stands at his door and hands a plate to Kryger, Frogman, my aunt, Levi Silas as they come in. They’re eating the goat. It’s on his table. They break off the legs and get goat slime on their faces.

  I still have such brilliant dreams of her, of Mary Beth, but I try not to dwell, I try to save their chemical radiation for times when I really need it.

  Stephen Florida is losing it.

  I go into the dark gym and by the light from the hallway I drag the tire from the corner into a place I can see and take the sledgehammer and do hammer throws, making the only sound for miles away, throwing them normal and then harder and harder, pretending I’m at the Big Strength Tester at night with all the lights and everything and trying to hit the bell at the top of the thermometer to win a stuffed animal for Mary Beth, a toad or a ladybug, something nice at least.

  At some point I sense something like meaning creeping up behind my shoulders, hanging around behind my neck, but whatever it is, it shyly goes away.

  I jump rope and hold one hundred Supermans for thirty seconds each and get to the top of the pegboard and do all the ladder shit and shoot the expressionless dummy three hundred and fifty times and do one hundred v-ups and hold a plank for seven minutes or what I count as seven minutes, four hundred and twenty seconds.

  The workout yields a drenched shirt. I reach the end of the hallway to discover a locked door. Locked! I attempt a spit but it’s so thick it doesn’t go out all the way, it just rappels down and smacks my belly. There’s a scruff of stagnant sweat around my eyes. I walk back up the hallway, hearing the water-fountain drip they’ll never fix, walk to the other side of the building, to the other door that is surely locked, and is locked.

  I pull the materials out of my face to make all these little crazies, pounded and shaped from the clay and meat of my worries and thoughts, and then I send them off. One by one. Off you go! Someday the figurines’ll come back and I’ll cry for them because I won’t recognize them.

  I do every drill in the book for an excessive number of reps and throw up a miniature amount twice and drink some water from the dripping fountain and find some stale opened granola in the training room, which is the location I end up sleeping in, on my stomach on the exam table with the lights on.

  Only I don’t fall asleep for good. I get up in the night, and as I’m heading to the fountain so I can rip a piss in it, I see something between the medicine cabinet and the wall.

  This is one of the moments where one’s fortune shifts, I already know it, it comes abruptly and certainly, that’s how luck works, it suddenly gets on top of you like a screaming fat woman.

  Crumbs fall off my chest as I crouch to pick it up. I knew it. I knew it.

  The green notebook, the same one Fink wrote in, the one he always writes in. Like a collector, I open the cover. In the upper-right corner of the first page is the neat signature R. Fink. In my hands there is a document of true evil.

  The first pages, I count five of them, are entirely filled up with the letter S. Like this:

  SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

  SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

  SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

  SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

  Then there’s a gap of blank pages, five also, and then, on the next few pages, all over the place, are miscellaneous drawings and figures, large and small. A compass. The sun with a face in it. A mushroom cloud spinning out of a yellow stain on the paper. Some long division. A thoroughly detailed pagoda that takes up most of one page. Some phone numbers. What looks like a desert island full of crabs, so many crabs they’re on top of each other and buried. A cowboy boot with a spur. Then the drawings stop. The last part of the notebook has very small writing, spaced apart. What it says, in part:

  scapulae

  Maybe Ill get the kid to help

  I wonder how long it took the other cow to bleed out.

  I have been back to the same place now for three weeks. Feels like Darwin on the Beagle, feels like never left. The erection begins in car, by time I pass that droning silver generator on the roadside. Maybe I should be more careful but I don’t care. After I get there and turn the lights off.

  During those years he met his seminars,

  went & lectured & read, talked with human beings,

  paid insurance & taxes;

  but his mind was not on it. His mind was elsewheres

  in an area where the soul not talks but sings

  & where foes are attacked with axes.

  After Louise goes to sleep I get out of bed and go up to the attic. I know I’ve kept telling myself I’m not ready but I can do it

  The giant pipe organ installed in church in the German countryside playing one long note scheduled to play for 675 years finish some time in 2600s Weights hold down keys Tourists walk into church and look at organ which behind a cube of acrylic glass to reduce volume.

  One Sister have I in our house,

  And one, a hedge away.

  There’s only one recorded,

  But both belong to me.

  Another Reminder of Michael, his Shoshone face in between coughing and spitting, Reminder of the hospital, Remember the cf that killed him, Remember the year before or after Mrs. Wagons used to shut door in bathroom and untuck the nice white shirt and untuck your shirt and tuck it back in over and over and reach down inside and twist, but that wasn’t so bad was it? Remember always thinking but then once asking him Are You Lonely, He looks up into the corner of the ceiling. What does he see? An angel hanging upside down with ruined wings and dirty robes? I don’t ask him. He wrote the poem for me and the poem was The man who has dreams without words never talks in his sleep.

  Dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead man dead

  Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.

  I think the easiest is to turn the gas and

  As if a snake could love an eel?

  133 is ok but lets see where this goes if hes held out

  I turn my eyes to the Schools and Universities of Europe

  And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,

  Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth

>   In heavy wreaths folds over every Nation: cruel Works

  Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic

  Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,

  Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.

  A funny feeling skitters up and down my backbone. I read it on the table, over and over, deciding Fink is also the person with something behind his back. Then I fall asleep.

  I wake up to humans walking around in the hallway. I hide behind the table until there’s no more noise, and then I run down the hallway and escape outside.

  I walk home, across the school, a place where news doesn’t get out or does but no one listens. No one knows what I have. Hargraves is the one I have to show the notebook to, no one else will believe me.

  When I’m shaving my head at the sink in the bathroom, Linus walks by behind me. I look at him in the mirror. I think his mouth moves but I can’t hear over the clippers. When I’m done I hear a shower going, but I do not pursue the line of inquiry. Yes, I do. I go right up to the curtain and annunciate above the running water, “Do you know when I first met you I worried that you didn’t understand abstract concepts? Like you were a simple dyslexic. Now I know once and for all you’re a whorish slave just like me.”

  And then: back in my room, the tremendous vertical heat pipe in the corner makes a ticking, increasing like a starting train, like the Frogman tapping with long fingers to let me know it’s not going to leave me alone that easy. A piece of paint falls off. It clicks faster and faster until it slows down and stops. In the hallway, a door slams.