The Throwback Special

by Chris Bachelder

  “Oh, no,” George said softly into the fabric of Andy’s seat.

  “Yes, that’s right. She said it was fascinating. It was a follow-up story, she said, about a recent ice storm in the Northeast. And they interviewed a tree expert who said that some of these big old trees—these majestic oaks and elms and pines—these trees, the expert said, could sometimes have up to fifty thousand pounds of ice in them. Fifty thousand. She kept repeating that number. Fifty thousand. And she kind of pursed her lips the way she does, and she tucked her hair behind her ear, and that was it. We had dinner, we went home and had sex in the bathtub, and the next day she said she thought it would be best if I would leave.”

  George groaned into the seat, and Andy could feel it in his chest. George kept a tight grip on the tops of Andy’s arms. “That is rough, man,” he said.

  Andy nodded. With the windows fogged, he could not see cars or men or hotel.

  “But hey, listen, I think you probably know,” George said, “that the problems had been building up for a long, long time before that night in February.”

  Andy stared at the dust on his dashboard. How does a car get so dusty? “That is true,” he said. He put his hand on top of the Redskins helmet, which was sitting obediently in the passenger seat. It seemed like a pet, an animate thing, stolid and content and loyal. He wished he were wearing it on his head.

  “Andy, I’ve got some of my homemade stuff in a flask,” George said. “You want some firewater?”

  Andy said yes, realizing too late that George would have to release his grip on Andy’s upper arms to retrieve his flask. Ungripped, Andy felt suddenly insubstantial, incoherent. He took a big drink from the flask. Whatever it was, was horrible, but he was grateful for it. When he handed the flask to the backseat, he looked into the mirror and watched George drink. Andy noticed that George’s thin gray hair, wet from the rain, was short and spiky on top. It was not pulled back.

  “Hey,” Andy said, “did you get your ponytail cut off?”

  George nodded while drinking. Then he coughed into the back of his hand. “A couple of months ago, I saw a picture of myself on the library blog,” he said. “It was taken from behind. And the next day I cut that thing off myself. It was time, man.”

  PETER TYPICALLY PARKED in the small lot at the side of the hotel. He had done it once as a mistake years ago, and now he maintained the practice out of his unarticulated sense that continuity was of a higher priority than convenience. A yellow sports car crouched dormant at one end of the nearly empty lot, far from the side entrance. The car was parked directly over a painted line, so as to take two full spots, proving once again to Peter that there are basically two types of people in the world. Though stationary and driverless, the car seemed contemptuous and reckless, with a wide, powerful backside. It seemed to want to break laws. It somehow gleamed without sunlight. In much the same way that he worried that his legs would fling his body from observation decks or scenic overlooks, Peter worried now that he would accelerate his Accord into the lean flank of the yellow sports car. He parked on the opposite side of the lot, pulling the emergency brake.

  Since Peter used a side entrance, the men who had entered the lobby—even Robert in his stuffed chair—did not notice him. The woman at the front desk looked up and smiled at Peter as he passed, but he did not acknowledge her. He walked to the dining area, where he filled a cup with water at the juice dispenser. Upon opening the microwave he was momentarily stunned by the miasma of irradiated popcorn. He blinked his eyes against the vapors, steadied his legs. The interior of the microwave, like the interiors of all public microwaves, resembled the scene of a double homicide. He put the cup inside, closed the door, and programmed the oven to heat the water on high for one minute and fifty-six seconds. The start button was concave with history, like the stone steps of an ancient cathedral. The microwave rattled and popped. A dim interior bulb cast a faint yellow glow on the revolving cup and the spattered walls. A sign on top of the microwave, framed like the photograph of a family pet, asked that microwave users please demonstrate a respectful attitude toward fellow users. The clip art image on the sign, inexplicably, was of a guitar. Peter paced as the green digital numbers descended toward zero. He touched the new mouthguard in his pocket. On his phone he checked the weather, sent a text, renewed a prescription. He stood on his left leg, flexing his right knee. He had reached an age when a sore knee might mean either that the knee was sore, or that the knee was shot. He frequently had occasion to consider the phrase bone on bone. The microwave oven rattled along like some World’s Fair exhibit. Could this really be, in our age, the fastest method for heating things up? Peter looked around, but there was nobody else in the dining area. A long banner above the continental buffet station welcomed Prestige Vista Solutions. On television, heavy wind pushed a car across a tennis court, eliciting nervous laughter and censored profanity from the amateur videographer. Peter ran his hand through his hair, which he had allowed to grow long in anticipation of a Saturday afternoon haircut from Carl. He did not particularly like Carl’s haircuts, but he got one every year, and he worried that he would hurt Carl’s feelings if he did not sign up. Peter stopped the microwave with two seconds remaining, and removed the hot cup of water. Then, following directions he knew very well, he dropped the new mouthguard into the slow boil. It floated there like a translucent semi-sessile annelid, the kind of tubular aquatic worm that is capable of regeneration. He left the guard in the water for slightly longer than directed, and instead of rinsing it quickly in cold water, as the instructions exhorted in bold font, he placed it directly into his mouth. He bit down hard, sucked vigorously to remove the air and water. He looked around, but there was nobody else in the dining area. The plastic was soft, and it tasted like synthetic butter. With his finger Peter pressed the scalding plastic into his gums; with his tongue he pushed the guard into the back of his top and bottom teeth. He sculpted the guard, made it his own. It was now unique. After a minute, which he counted more or less accurately in his head, he extracted the mouthguard and rinsed it in cold water from the juice dispenser. He put the mouthguard back into his mouth, and looked around. If the fit was not good, he could boil the mouthguard again. The fit was good, but he decided to boil the mouthguard again.

  IN THE MEN’S RESTROOM off the lobby—frequently the subject of online reviews—the countertop and floor were wet, not as if an employee had recently cleaned them but as if firefighters had recently managed a blaze. A light above a corner stall was flickering dimly, reinforcing for Carl the correlation between luminance and civilization. In a brightly lit stall with the door closed, Carl pinched pills from his pocket and swallowed them without water. He reached beneath his damp Jim Burt jersey to touch the strange, tender bump that had recently appeared in his armpit, gently at first and then with painful pressure. The bump was hard, and it would not flatten or disperse with the force of his fingers. It seemed not to contain fluid. Perhaps he could show it to Charles, whom he knew to be a doctor of some kind. Hanging from a hook on the back of the door was the sort of brown canvas shoulder bag used by practitioners of the soft sciences. Carl removed the bag from the hook, and looked inside. He found two books, one called A Better Mirror, and the other titled A Clinical Guide to Anorexia, 4th Edition. He dropped the books loudly on the wet floor, along with a thick three-ring binder, a day planner, and a manila envelope labeled “Protocols.” In the front pocket of the leather bag Carl found a DVD with the handwritten title “Marla Sessions.” He put the DVD into his coat pocket. He also took a large, pungent rubber band and a black Sharpie. He removed the top of the Sharpie and turned to face the broad blue partition of the stall. The surface was clean, though its gloss had been scuffed and dulled by solvents and abrasives. There was nothing on the wall to which to respond, no lewd conversational thread he could join with arrow and riposte. He didn’t want to draw a dirty picture. He didn’t want to insult someone’s penis, or testicles. He didn’t want to scribble song lyrics or to extol mariju
ana. The wall was so blank, so clean. He was committed to writing on it, but he didn’t want to misquote Nietzsche or Camus. He didn’t want to request a sexual act or to offer sexual services or to say anything at all about gays, blacks, Muslims, Jews, or God. He didn’t want to post a threat. He didn’t want to compose or transcribe a limerick about constipation. His shoulder began to ache from holding the pen aloft. The light above the corner stall flickered. The beginning was the most difficult part.

  THE MEN CONGREGATED in the lobby, within the formidable purview of the enormous clock. Many held shoulder pads and helmets. Many had tied the laces of their cleats together, draped the laces over their shoulders. Gil demonstrated, with his hands, the size of the kitten he had found beneath his gazebo. Chad nodded, far more troubled by Gil’s gazebo than by his kitten. Myron, with that startled look on his face, sought out Charles. Jeff tried to discern what seemed different about Trent, this year’s commissioner. Trent had gained a lot of weight, perhaps thirty pounds, but the change was not remarkable. The men had reached an age when they gained and lost significant things in relatively short periods of time, and it was not unusual for someone to show up in November having acquired or divested weight, God, alcohol, sideburns, blog, pontoon boat, jewelry, stepchildren, potency, fertility, cyst, tattoo, medical devices that clipped to the belt and beeped, or huge radio-controlled model airplanes. The added weight seemed to coincide with Trent’s leadership role, and it contributed to his authority as commissioner.

  An aerial view of the lobby would have revealed more or less concentric arcs around the dry fountain, or perhaps around Derek, who was sitting, in flagrant contravention of a handwritten sign, on the fountain’s edge. The general effect was not unlike the standard model of the atom. Randy, sitting glumly on a bench upholstered with a pattern of Eiffel Towers and poodles, was a distant outlier, as was the woman at the front desk, who was conducting Internet research on a bartending school called Highball Academy. (“We should totally do it,” her friend had recently told her.) The men looked frequently at the clock, like pupils at a teacher. They looked occasionally at the woman, who so powerfully ignored them all. And they looked only rarely at Randy, who merely by sitting there unhappily collected from the beholder a kind of tax or levy in the form of an automatic withdrawal of sentiment. Randy was a figure who demanded the viewer’s sympathy or disdain, and the other men resented having to make that choice, with all of its implications. To look at Randy was to have an aggressive confrontation with oneself, which was not what the men wanted this weekend, or ever. Randy’s socks had lost their elasticity, of course, and they pooled lugubriously around black shoes whose heels had been wrecked by pronation. His herniated duffel bag lay at his feet. He had been unable to zip it completely, and in the unzipped bulge the men could have seen, had they been looking toward Randy, a small piece of the new and astonishingly white Jeff Bostic jersey. What most of the men had learned by now was that Randy’s Bostic gear from the previous year had been stolen, according to Randy, from a self-storage unit outside of Wilmington, Delaware, and that Trent, using the discretion of the commissioner, had spent the dues money to replace the equipment rather than to rent out the conference room, which had been reserved by a baleful organization called Prestige Vista Solutions. What many of the men would suspect—and they would be correct—was that Randy, having lost his eyewear business, had sold the equipment in an online auction.

  Jeff’s check-in attempt had been rebuffed, and the other men thought it wise not to risk further attempts. The woman at the front desk skimmed the FAQs at the Highball Academy site, and strands of her hair fell over her face like an Out of Office sign. She did not want to talk to the men about check-in. She disliked the notion that check-in time was flexible or negotiable, and she was strongly opposed to the men’s duffel bags. She did not consider herself picky about men, but a duffel bag—she was sorry, that was just a deal-breaker. Her job, perhaps, had made her overly sensitive to luggage. She needed a man with a suitcase. No pleated pants, no exotic pets, no duffel bags—certainly there remained a sizable pool.

  Wesley occupied the third arc with Bald Michael, Steven, and Nate. A very large canvas sack sat like a heeling dog beside Steven. The sack contained the lottery drum, enormous even when disassembled, that the men would use later that night to select players. Wesley had hoped to get a nap before the lottery. He had been having trouble sleeping for the past several months, and he typically felt exhausted in the afternoon. His entire life he had never had trouble sleeping, but all of a sudden he just couldn’t do it. The insomnia made Wesley feel, biologically, like a failure. The family’s pet cat slept twenty hours a day, and made it look easy. And now, granted many extra waking hours each night, Wesley had time to consider, for the first time, his other failures and shortcomings. Bald Michael was talking, Wesley realized, about his son, who just last week, Bald Michael said, began cruising.

  “What?” Wesley said.

  Bald Michael said that the kid already had a shiner and a big scratch on his nose. “He’s banging into everything,” he said.

  Wesley tried to conduct a quick audit of his discomfort. Steven and Nate did not seem troubled. Why did Steven and Nate not seem troubled? Why was Nate doing that strange crouched shuffling? One time, at a party, Wesley had overheard someone on a crowded patio explaining the customs of Fire Island, and it had made his toes curl. Then Steven did a pigeon-toed walk, and fell over. Why did Steven do that?

  “No, like this,” Bald Michael said, gripping the back of a chair and doing his own version of the walk of someone who was significantly injured or perhaps disabled. Nate and Steven laughed, so Wesley tried to laugh, too. Was Bald Michael making fun of the apparently serious erotic injuries sustained by his homosexual son?

  “Hell, but what can I do?” Bald Michael said. “It’s just a natural step. He has to go through it.”

  “And at least he’s got a lot of padding,” Steven said, slapping his backside.

  Wesley studied them. He realized that if this was what it meant to be accepting, then he was not accepting. Bald Michael pulled a photograph from his wallet, and passed it to the men.

  “Cute little guy,” Nate said, passing the photo to Steven, who grunted his appreciation, and passed it to Wesley. The photo showed a toddler with a sweater vest and a chin rash. Wesley stared at the photo, and felt the sting of tears. He was so very tired.

  “Wesley,” Bald Michael said, “don’t you have a boy, too?”

  Wesley’s boy was nineteen years old, and three inches taller than Wesley. He was a remarkable kid. He had not had a girlfriend since the eighth grade. Wesley felt that he and his son had not been close in many years.

  “He’s in college,” Wesley said, though that fact sounded preposterous to him. “He’s a pre-dentistry major, but he likes philosophy. He plays Ultimate Frisbee, which apparently is a serious sport. And he’s probably gay. I think he probably is, though he hasn’t said anything to me or to Barbara.”

  The third arc grew quiet. Bald Michael and Nate made sounds and faces that were intended to be supportive of Wesley’s son’s sexuality.

  “It just seems like more and more people are,” Nate offered. Bald Michael nodded. Steven’s face did not look supportive at all, but in fact Steven had stopped listening. He had overheard a conversation about Redskins receiver Gary Clark in the fourth arc, on the far outskirts of the fountain.

  “Excuse me, guys,” Steven said, jumping like an electron to an outer shell. The men in the third arc assumed the worst about Steven. He was from Arkansas. Some people weren’t quite ready for change.

  “He wasn’t a Smurf,” Steven said to the men in the fourth arc—Trent, Peter, and Jeff.

  “Who?” Jeff said.

  “Cahk,” Peter said. “Guhh Cahk.”

  “I clearly heard someone say that Gary Clark was a Smurf,” Steven said. “And he wasn’t.”

  “He had to be,” Trent said. “He was tiny.”

  “Fumbudge den,” Peter
said.

  “He was small, but he wasn’t one of the Smurfs,” Steven said. “The Smurfs were Virgil Seay, Alvin Garrett, and Charlie Brown. And that was before Clark was drafted out of James Madison.”

  “Cahk uz pot uv fumbudge,” Peter said.

  “Take out your mouthguard,” Jeff said.

  Peter removed his mouthguard, which remained umbilically connected to his mouth by a thin strand of saliva. “Clark was part of the Fun Bunch,” he said.

  “Wrong again,” Steven said with gleeful exasperation. “The Fun Bunch dissolved after the ’84 season. The league made the rule about excessive celebration, and that all but wiped out the Fun Bunch. Excessive celebration, you may recall, was pretty much the Fun Bunch’s reason for being.”

  “I think the key term here is orchestrated,” Trent said.

  “Ready?” Jeff said. He bent his knees and swung his arms, counting to three. It appeared that he wanted to reenact the Fun Bunch’s group high-five, but the other men ignored him, and Jeff did not leave the carpet.

  “Wait,” said Gil, who had leaped two levels to join the conversation. “Did the Smurfs and the Fun Bunch exist at the same time?”

  “The Smurfs were basically a subset of the Fun Bunch,” Steven said, drawing circles in the air. “Contained within the superset of the Fun Bunch was the Smurfs, who were the Fun Bunch’s smallest receivers. Think of it like this: all Smurfs belonged to the Bunch, but not every member of the Bunch was a Smurf.”

  “Was that thunder?” Jeff said, looking toward the parking lot.

  “Gary Clark was part of the Posse,” said Myron, materializing out of some unknown arc with a startled look on his face.