Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  Wrestling has kept me busy for about ten years but I’ve been worrying more and more that it’ll do nothing for me once it’s over.

  Monday morning, I get dressed and slip the green notebook inside my backpack.

  After taking my usual seat (the other five do, too) I screw my attention tight for the whole Jazz class and concentrate on Silas’s face.

  “I’m going to play ‘Caravan’ by Thelonious Monk. His middle name’s Sphere. Remember that for the test.” I underline Thalonius Sphere Monk in my notebook. In the margin of the same page, I do an A/B comparison, with the A row being Silas and the B row being Fink and the comparison being Evil. “Caravan” elapses, and once I ensure Silas is doing his standard eyes-closed, arms-crossed pose during the song, I complete the chart. The comparison is decided in a best of three categories:

  Is there a logical explanation for why he is so evil?

  What does he do at night?

  What is the worst thing he’s ever done?

  It looks like this:

  Category 1 goes to Silas but Categories 2 and 3 are won by Fink. But remember this is only a preliminary chart.

  After the song finishes, Silas leans forward in the chair and puts another record on. He says, “One more song. This one is called ‘’Round Midnight’ and it’s the most recorded jazz standard. Who knows what a jazz standard is?”

  A total of five seconds pass.

  “It’s a composition held in ongoing esteem that is often used by many musicians as the foundation of jazz arrangements or improvisations.”

  A male voice, the voice of Pervis, asks from very far away for Silas to repeat the definition.

  “A composition held in ongoing esteem that is often used by many musicians as the foundation of jazz arrangements or improvisations.” He puts the needle on. “Pay attention to this version. Because later we’re going to hear Miles Davis’s version and you’ll need to be able to differentiate between the two.”

  The song starts, and it sounds the goddamn same. I write piano bingle next to Thalonius Sphere Monk.

  Silas writes Thelonious Monk on the board. I make the spelling correction in my notes. I turn around to see what exactly is going on back there, just as one girl chucks a crumpled ball of paper at another girl. The paper bounces off her head. She uncrumples it, looks at whatever’s on it, recrumples it, and drops it below the desk, by her feet.

  After the song, he gives us some biography bits. Monk didn’t finish high school, was an evangelist and played the organ in church, got his start with Coleman Hawkins. Blah blah blah. Silas could not sound less interested in relaying the information. I circle Coleman Hawkins because “Body and Soul” will be on the listening test, too. He puts on one last record, one he leaves on the player. “‘So What’ by Miles Davis, from Kind of Blue, a record of great significance to me, and to music as a whole.” He says, “See you Wednesday,” and leaves the room.

  By pretending to finish up some notes, I’m the last one in there. The song plays for no one else as I walk up to the back corner and scoop up the paper ball and hide it in my pocket. Halfway across campus, when I’m sure no one from the class is around, I open it up. What this appears to be, though I can’t be sure, is a drawing of the male-female act of penetration. The female side of things is crude but all-right accurate. But instead of the male part of the bargain, it looks like it’s a ponytail doing the job.

  I’m collecting data on him. Soon enough I’m going to figure this entire goddamn puzzle out.

  During practice, I keep my mouth shut. I observe all of it, observe most closely Fink for signs of agitation, but get nothing. I hold on to my knowledge, I don’t want to blow my whole load before I know what to do with it.

  And anyway, I forget all about the green notebook in the locker room when Hargraves stops everyone and says he needs silence. Then he takes out Amateur Wrestling News, the new issue, and turns to the rankings. He tears out the page and holds it up importantly like the Ninety-Five Theses. “This latest ranking for the Division IV 125 weight class has Linus Arrington of Oregsburg College ranked number one.” Above the shouting and the clapping, he yells, “This is the first time in the program’s history we’ve had a number one,” and after Crest and Clark and Ucher and Lyle and the others are done shoving him and shouting, during which he looks like a young pharaoh, Linus lifts his arms and makes a V sign on each hand like Richard Nixon, shouting, “I’d like to thank the Academy!”

  Hargraves tapes the page on the chalkboard. The noise takes some time to die down, there has not been an actual reason to celebrate in the locker room since we qualified for the conference championship, which was four years ago, which was before most of them were around. I walk up to the board. 11–0. The glaring realization of Linus’s ownership, something he went out and took, something he deserves.

  I will admit, I have no delusions at this point in time, it’s from a place of woeful envy that I wait for all the coaches to clear out and then I aim my shoe and throw it across the room at Linus and it strikes the side of his face. “Get out of my goddamn locker room.” I keep my reasons straight! What everyone else interprets as smallness is really me letting Linus know that I’m still here. That I’m not going away. That I’m going to allow the rest of them to tackle me, the back of my skull nicking the chalkboard, call me asshole, call me piece of shit, mush my face to the cheap scratchy carpeting that smells of decades of old water and chemical cleaner, but I feel like I’m floating, like I’m the gas thief who’s broken into the dentist’s and found the good stuff. Linus grabs his bag and leaves without saying anything, which is how I know I’ve gotten to him. I start laughing. “Let me have my shoe.” One of them behind me with his knee on my neck says, “Linus isn’t your scrapegoat.” Because I’ve figured out that anger is best used when rolled into the greater part of determination, or commitment, or whatever. And I’ve already maxed out the anger quota. I don’t have bad judgment. I have no judgment left at all. Kryger walks up slow and comfortable in his new place, and kneels down. He looks at me closely, like he’s never seen me before, or has, but not in the way he should’ve, as if now he wants to get it right.

  “Calm down,” he says. “Sit still until you’re calmed down.”

  “You sound like Fink.” I let them keep my head on the floor with all their distasteful hands because I have the key, I have the green notebook. And though I don’t know what exactly its significance is, when I hold it in my hands it throbs and spittles, slavering to spill the beans. And so I slacken. Close my eyes. Deep breath. Patience.

  My asshole is the dark zero.

  Like a baby, I try Mary Beth’s number, but she won’t help me get out of this, it’s my own fucking problem.

  No one is out on my night walk to the gym. As I turn off the main path and cross the grass, I see a car in the parking lot. It’s parked in the fringe of the lot, out of the reach of the floodlights, with the headlights off. I step back into the shadow and pull my hood over my head, squatting in the grass. I watch. On the random days where Hargraves calls for a second practice, I have had to readjust and come later than normal, but this is the only time I’ve seen someone in the lot this late. After a minute or two, when nothing happens, it’s clear whoever’s inside hasn’t seen me. Then the passenger door opens and someone gets out. It’s Linus. He walks in the opposite direction, away from the campus’s middle. I can’t get closer without stepping into the light. Then I hear the gear shifting and the headlights turn on. The car pulls onto the road and drives away. I never get a good look inside.

  After my second season, after I lost eleven matches, I went back to Oakes to look at my house. I just stood there in the road, staring at the front door. I must’ve been looking for some time, but when I heard a car coming down the street, I turned and ran.

  There’s a surprise waiting for me at practice, first that Hargraves isn’t there to show the notebook to and that he won’t be coming to Watertown later. The whole plan’s fucked. I try to get information
out of one of them but nothing comes of it because of the second surprise, which is a black-and-gray-haired woman in some sort of expensive blouse-skirt combo, doing the rounds and talking to the team, making most of them puff out and peacock around. She carries a notepad. She’s a reporter with the Wells Register.

  It’s obvious why she’s here. I just resume my place on the bike. After removing Mary Beth’s card from my shoe so I don’t soak it, I do my fucking prescription. I have to keep reminding myself I have the green notebook, but I can’t get Hargraves alone, I don’t know where he is. All my sweat falls off my face and swamps under the bike. During drills, the reporter buzzes around Linus, mooning over him. Kryger tries to get her attention until he realizes she’s not biting. She writes down stray things they spit out, things that, sucked free of circumstance, may appear wise or perceptive but really are just pulled from the mouths of buttholes.

  Because the coaches insist on talking to her in my vicinity, I hear more than I’d like.

  Fink: “What Linus is doing here, it’s extraordinary. No one’s talking about it. It’s like, ‘Oh, some kid is up there in one of the Dakotas winning a few matches, that’s nice.’ But that’s not what’s happening. If you’ve seen him wrestle, he’s not just winning, he’s destroying his opponent. There are three or four times during a match, he’s doing things no one else can do. He’s just demolishing these kids. I’ve been around the sport for a long time. He’s the best wrestler I’ve ever coached, and he’s only wrestled, what? Twelve, thirteen times at this level? He has no ceiling. I mean, the sky’s the limit. Soon people are going to see what this kid’s capable of, and it’s going to be something else.”

  Another one I can’t remember the name of: “I don’t know why schools weren’t tripping over each other to hand him a scholarship, hand him the keys to the program. But their loss is our gain. We’re lucky to have him. I think he takes pride, you know, in proving everyone wrong.”

  I find out her name is Patsy Pierce, this when she jumps in my way as I’m heading for the exit.

  “Mr. Florida?”

  “Hello.”

  “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I’m here doing a story on Linus Arrington. How he’s the first Oregsburg wrestler to get ranked number one?”

  “Yes, he is my son.”

  “Well, anyway, he told me you’re his best friend.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “Or most trusted. No—closest. Actually, I don’t know, I can’t read my own writing! Isn’t that funny? It’s one or the other. Also called you his own personal role model. Is that true?”

  Here he is, having fun with me through the media. We feed lies to each other. I don’t mention my inner feeling about Linus, which is that Linus and me are having a deep disagreement, bordering on the philosophical. Once, I sat up late with him pondering balance, on how important balance is, and we looked out the window, as if true wrestling balance could be found in a tree like a nuthatch, or a rare drooling vulture.

  “I’ve really got to get going. We’re leaving—”

  “Three questions. Then I’ll let you go. Promise.”

  “O.K., go ahead with it.”

  “Question one. Tell me about yourself.”

  “I’m from Idaho,” I say. “My parents love each other very much. As a child they took me to a prehistoric park where I was just fascinated by the animals that used to live. I have two sisters. Janice is in the navy and Gladys is a very successful insurance agent. I take studying very seriously. I get all A’s.”

  “And how have you changed since Idaho?”

  “You mean since coming here? To wrestle for Oregsburg?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’ve been the same since I was born. I just had to wait for myself to grow into what I’ve become.”

  “And those scars—sorry, do you mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “The scars on your forehead. From wrestling?”

  All the scars take up residence in my forehead, it’s the most popular block in the neighborhood. I had a little bit of acne in middle school, long enough to make a mark and then leave, and during my last season at Hillsboro in the weight room, the bar slipped out of my hand and crashed against my head. It took a week for the headache to die down. “Yes,” I say.

  “Question two. You’ve had some success here.”

  It does not sound like a question, so I just look at her.

  She says, “What I mean is. Wrestling is about great sacrifice, isn’t it?”

  “For me, I haven’t had to sacrifice that much.”

  “Does failure scare you?”

  “No. Other things scare me.”

  “Question three. Everyone knows wrestling is a notoriously challenging sport. Can you give some idea of what it’s like?”

  “What what’s like?”

  “Everything. The season. Doing all this.” She gestures at the gym, waits for my insight.

  “Well … well, it’s like catching liquid in your hands!”

  An expression like she thinks I’ve recently lost my mind. She writes something in her notepad.

  “Is that good?” I blurt out, bending over the pad to see what she’s writing, because I don’t want my stuff taken out of context.

  “Very interesting. And how do you manage what that feels like? That feeling?”

  “Sometimes I become the person I’m meant to be.”

  After she tells me thank you, she gets whether it’s with a ph or a v and walks away.

  While waiting for them to pack the vans, Nate pretends to be holding a microphone in front of Linus’s face while various members of the team laugh about it.

  On the drive to Watertown, I read Fink’s notebook. I read it again and again, the bags rumbling underneath me the whole way, memorizing the words. I decide what makes him so evil is he has the capability to guess your insides. What I mean is that he’s figured me out and is acting against what I want for an unclear reason.

  One of them in the van tells a story. A girl, a sophomore or junior, started dumping gasoline all over herself in the middle of school, under the clock tower, but was tackled before she could get the match struck. Two different people say she was singing “Can I Get to Know You Better” by the Turtles while she was getting on with it.

  Sometime later, someone else in the van says that Fink’s wife is coming.

  We get to the Society Motel, which has a red neon sign and yellow safety lights that dredge it out of the dark. It’s late enough that no one goes anywhere.

  I wake up screaming, sure a smiling man is pushing needles under my fingernails. “Shut up, Florida!” someone yells, and then I realize it’s the middle of the night and my bed is scratchy and the sheet has four cigarette burn holes in it and I’m sleeping in someone else’s mental stains and my roommate is Lyle.

  A long time later, the light is shining on my head through the window, through the flame-retardant curtains.

  The parking lot is gravel with weeds turned to brown sticks. All the vans have gone. Cars pass infrequently.

  I’ll admit that I’ve thought about the last loss of last season every single day since it’s happened. That’s about eleven months now. I will admit that for a week or two last year, I’d get out of my bed and walk to the library and after a little searching I’d find some of the most popular suicide sites. I got paper cuts on two fingers turning the pages of the thousand-page Historical and Statistical Manual of Depression and Suicide. Nanjing Yangtze Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, Prince Edward Viaduct, bridges bridges bridges. Bridges where they install phones with direct connections to suicide hotlines, bridges where they keep raising the rails. A suicide forest in Japan inspired by a book where people walk past signs letting them know their life is valuable and please don’t throw it away. At the end of chapter seventeen, a note about pentobarbital, high doses of it, bought from pet shops in Mexico to induce painless death in pets that owners take ho
me and swallow themselves. Suicide tourism, organized, thought-out trips to Cambodia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, places where euthanasia is legal. If I looked closely at my fingers, at the paper cuts, and squeezed, I could make them talk like little mouths. This felt good. Sitting at a shaky basement library table, looking this up, getting cuts from studying. But Mary Beth was right. I was never more than a casual suicide-thinker, gazing up at the rafters of the cafeteria and failing to imagine one of them holding my full weight, as though the body dangling up there was an actor, or a dummy in a wig stuffed with straw.

  One of the white doors opens, number thirty, about halfway down the motel face on my right, and a woman with a baby comes out. I know, because fate insists, that this is Mrs. Fink. Mrs. Fink has a walking boot on. The right foot. She clumps it by me and goes to the office at the other end of the motel.

  I have an idea.

  In the office, the baby is hitting Mrs. Fink in the arm. Standing at the counter to the side of the desk, with her free arm she takes a foam cup and fills it with coffee. Then she sits on the couch against the wall. There’s no one at the desk, no one else around. Events proceed quickly. I’ve put on Lyle’s wool beanie to hide my identity and ears. I walk by and as I pass, the baby cries and Mrs. Fink swears and says, “Excuse me,” saying it to me.

  She points at the counter. “Can you hand me that ring rattle?” Next to the red stirrer straws is a transparent plastic ring with several colored balls settled inside it. I walk it over, sure the object’s smothered with the saliva of the child, but she takes it, or rather he takes it and jams it into his mouth, as much as he can fit.

  She doesn’t say thank you, which I find interesting and chalk up to the state of motherhood, where you are no longer so full of gratitude all the time. “It’s his favorite, it makes such an enormous racket,” she says. “I just had to get some coffee, he’s driving me up a wall.”