The Throwback Special

by Chris Bachelder

  ADAM STOOD LOOKING out the window of Room 212 like a homesteader during an April blizzard. The defensive backs, and particularly the safeties, were the least prominent of the players. They backpedaled from tragedy, like inverse first responders. Their job was essential, but remote and untelevised. This feeling, of being important but unrecognized, distant from the hub, was all too familiar to most of the men. The long-standing notion was that the defensive backs’ room was the party room—“Vegas”—but the truth was that the room typically had a sour mood and an early bedtime.

  “If you work in the automotive industry, you have to be thinking about the end of cars,” Adam said, still facing the window. “If you work in phones, you have to be preparing for the day when people don’t use phones anymore. If you work in laptops, you spend your days imagining what comes after laptops. Everything thriving is dying. Every industry has become the fashion industry. The car is dead, the book is dead, the PC is dead. My office is paperless. Potatoes are somehow bad for you. People don’t want to live in houses anymore. It’s exhausting.”

  “Why were you so late, Adam?” Peter said.

  “It was a domestic situation,” Adam said.

  “What isn’t?” Peter said.

  “It was a family emergency,” Adam said.

  “You got that right,” Peter said.

  The heating and cooling unit ticked and clanked. Chad sat in the orange chair, looking at his phone. His feet, in socks, were wet and cold. He felt that the cold, wet socks were emblematic of his folly and weakness. His throat burned from the cigarette he had bummed off that gray-faced marketer from Prestige Vista Solutions. He wished he had not smoked that cigarette. And it had been foolish to throw his shoes in the dumpster, he now realized. The only other shoes he had were his cleats. At the time he had thrown his shoes in the dumpster he had felt a rush of defiance, but whom, exactly, had he defied? He liked the shoes, or had at one time, and so he had apparently defied only himself. He had spited his face. He had hoisted himself. His wife hated the shoes, and though she had not demanded or even suggested (nor would she, ever) that he discard the shoes, in discarding them he was, he now felt, executing remotely her unspoken wish. That the actualization of his wife’s desire had felt, out in the rain by the hotel dumpster, so authentically like the actualization of his own desire, meant either that they were soul mates, or that he lived under a totalitarian regime. How was it that he could not, here in his cold, wet socks, make any meaningful distinction between compliance and defiance, or ascertain to whom he had stuck it, if indeed he had stuck it to someone? It was true, however, that his wife was frugal, and she would no doubt object to his throwing away perfectly functional (though detestable) shoes, and so in this way perhaps the act was defiant in its profligacy, like the Boston Tea Party. He would teach her a lesson. He would show her not to not like his things. But that was not what he wanted! He wanted her to like his things, which meant that inevitably she would not like some things. He cared about what she thought. If your defiance reveals vulnerability, not strength, it’s really not very effective defiance. Chad’s original embarrassment about buying the shoes was now compounded by the embarrassment about throwing them away. He had acted like a maniac, and now he wanted his shoes. A genuinely defiant act, he realized, would be to retrieve the shoes from the wet dumpster. That would be a bold expression of his life force. He could dry them with the hair dryer attached to the wall in the hotel bathroom. But what about Andy and Nate? They had thrown their shoes in the dumpster, too, in a spirit of inebriated and defiant camaraderie, and as an expression of their individual wills. They had all thrown their shoes away, together, instead of smoking a cigarette, but then the guy from Prestige Vista Solutions shuffled out of the side exit with a full pack, and they had all smoked a cigarette anyway, even though they had all quit. Chad hated himself. If he pulled his shoes out of the dumpster, Nate and Andy would no doubt see the shoes tomorrow, and they would consider the recovery a sign of weakness, not strength—a kind of capitulation to the overwhelming forces of (feminized) convention, a disavowal of their defiant ritual in the rain. Chad was trapped between two incommensurable systems of meaning. Sifting through the cold and soaking trash of the hotel dumpster would be both noble and craven, depending upon the interpretive community. “Fun here,” Chad texted to his wife. “Luv u.” Charles, who was either a psychologist or a psychiatrist, was here, in this room, and perhaps he could be of help to Chad, but he was at the moment occupied by Peter, who was troubled by a recent incident in the home.

  (Chad had missed some of the story, but it seems that Peter had been roasting marshmallows by himself with his gas stove in the middle of the night when his seven-year-old son entered the kitchen and witnessed the scene. I thought I smelled something, the child had said, staring at Peter warily, refusing to return to bed. Peter just stood there with two perfectly golden marshmallows on the end of a barbecue fork. Big deal, Adam said, still staring out the window. Continue, Charles said. He had the look of one betrayed, Peter said. I think he had a hard time with it, with the idea that this person he loved and trusted could roast marshmallows while he slept. It’s been a couple of weeks, and he’s had trouble falling asleep. He’s wet the bed a couple of times. I shouldn’t have done it, I guess, Peter said. It wasn’t a dessert night. A phone vibrated in a duffel bag. I’m glad you’re here, Charles. Charles, I’m glad you’re here. Chad waited in his wet socks, and the waiting felt emblematic.)

  “WHERE’S ANDY?” Gil said in the offensive linemen’s room.

  “Probably out smoking,” Trent said.

  “No, he quit,” Gil said.

  “I could smell it on him earlier,” Trent said.

  Trent was lying on his back in bed. The laptop quivered on his stomach like a dog on a roof. Gil stood in front of the television, flipping rapidly through channels.

  “What are you looking for?” Trent said.

  “What?” Gil said.

  “What show are you looking for?”

  “I don’t watch shows.”

  “Then what do you watch?”

  “I don’t care about individual programs,” Gil said. “That kind of vertical viewing doesn’t interest me.”

  “What interests you?”

  “This,” Gil said, continuing to cycle swiftly through the channels. “Holistic viewing.”

  “I watch shows,” Trent said.

  “Every channel, every show, is just part of one big show. Like every channel is a pixel, making up a larger picture, the big picture. I started watching like this, and I realized I was getting more and not really losing anything.”

  “What does your wife think?” Trent said.

  “She hides the remote,” Gil said. “But she’s not a horizontal processor. She doesn’t think that way. A lot of women don’t.”

  “What about, like, cohesion?” Trent said. “Or sus­pense?”

  “Suspense is an ancient value,” Gil said.

  “Exactly,” Trent said. He steadied his wobbling laptop, and sent a message to the Fracture Compound about Gil’s horizontal viewing.

  “I had an idea to program my remote to do it for me,” Gil said. “But then I realized I was thinking about it all wrong. Why alter the auxiliary technology when you could alter the primary technology? The ideal thing would be to have a dedicated channel, a station, that moved through all other channels at random. Horizon TV, I call it. I bet you could sell plenty of ad time because a thirty-second spot would seem, in contrast, like a vast narrative space. And you’d basically have zero production and development costs. No writers, no producers, no actors. But I couldn’t see a way to get past the lawyers.”

  Trent chuckled, staring into his screen. “Hey, Gil,” he said, “I’ve got a mole in the Compound. Looks like George is walking on backs.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Gil said, rolling his eyes, though his own back had been walked on by George four years earlier, which had nearly precipitated a severe late-night breakdown. He remembered George’s
feet clearly, the high arches. He remembered the weight, the struggle to find his breath. He kept flipping channels, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. He couldn’t concentrate, and totality was eluding him. He turned off the TV and pitched the remote onto the empty bed. Pitching a remote onto a large bed was a satisfying hotel activity, and Gil retrieved the remote so that he could do it once more.

  “You know, here we are, the offensive line,” he said. “We’re paid to do one thing, protect the quarterback.”

  “It was 1985,” Trent said. “So we aren’t paid all that much.”

  “Counting Warren, there are six of us down linemen, right? And five of them coming on defense? There’s one thing we have to do, and we will just fail so bad at it.”

  “Not you,” Trent said. “May is solid. Wait until you see the film.”

  “But six against five.”

  “The play call was terrible,” Trent said. “I don’t care what anybody says.”

  “It’s a bad feeling, though,” Gil said. “Can you even imagine what those real guys must have been feeling like the night before?”

  “They didn’t know it was going to happen, Gil.”

  “But still,” Gil said.

  “Hey, Gil,” Trent said, chuckling at his laptop screen. “George has got his magic flask out.”

  Andy was gone, and Robert was in the bathroom, washing his hands and face. The bathroom fan obscured Gil’s infuriating television habits, to which Robert had been introduced in a previous year. He dried off with a thin towel, noticing as he often did the twin scars on the backs of his hands. He had received both injuries as a child. One was from a cigarette, one from hot coffee. As a child—seven years old, or eight—he liked to crawl beneath chairs and tables, particularly tables draped with tablecloths. He liked to be near his family but not with them. He liked the secrecy, the privacy. His parents were always telling him to get out from under there or he would get hurt. And that’s what had happened. His father dangled an after-dinner cigarette beside his chair, and the glowing tip pressed into the center of Robert’s hand. At some other point, perhaps a year later, he crawled out from beneath a table he had been told not to crawl beneath, jostling the leg and spilling a mug of hot coffee onto his other hand. It had been Robert’s fault, both times. His parents had not been cruel or punitive, but it was clear that they regarded the injuries as the child’s fault. They felt bad for Robert, and they cared for his wounds, but they did not feel culpable. After all, they had told him repeatedly not to crawl beneath things, and they had told him what would likely happen if he did. He did not listen, and it happened just as they said it would. And that was how Robert had always thought of the injuries, too. The scars were reminders of foolish things he had done. They stood for his folly and mischief. The accidents happened to occur during a generation when children could be at fault, and that era was long gone. If Robert’s hot coffee spilled onto his daughter, or worse, if he smoked cigarettes in the house and if one of his cigarettes burned the girl, he would clearly bear the burden of guilt and responsibility, regardless of whether he had warned her. The child’s scar would stand for his carelessness, his neglect. It’s not simply that he would feel it as censure from others (though he most certainly would); he would legitimately feel at fault. The child, doing childlike things, would be innocent. If you have children, you just don’t dare drink hot beverages. And if you are irresponsible enough to drink hot beverages, you don’t use an open-mouth mug, and you certainly don’t set the mug on a table, where it could be knocked to the floor, scalding your unsuspecting child, who is merely exploring her world in a trusting, innocent, curious way (their brains are like sponges!), and who could not be expected to heed admonitions in simple English to stay out from beneath the table. Robert could hold both verdicts in his mind—that his childhood injuries had been his own fault for crawling beneath a table he had been told not to crawl beneath, and that his own child’s heartbreaking (and hypothetical) burn injury beneath the table would also be his fault. Neither conclusion seemed to impinge on the other, a paradox rooted either in psychology or culture. Robert did not know which. There was no point in talking to Charles because he was never any help, and in fact he seemed uninterested.

  Robert left the bathroom, and nearly bumped into Andy, who was just returning to the hotel room.

  “Hi, Robert,” Andy said.

  “Hi, Andy,” Robert said. He had always liked Andy, and he was not displeased to see him. Given the alternatives, he hoped they would be sharing a bed.

  “Are you done in there?” Andy said.

  “It’s all yours.”

  Holding a pair of dripping shoes, Andy entered the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the hair dryer attached to the wall.

  FAT MICHAEL was not in the touchers’ room. Carrying a bottle of Advanced Water, a pack of antibacterial wipes, and his Theismann helmet, he had left the room without saying anything to Tommy and Myron. Tommy and Myron, though, could pretty well guess where he had gone.

  The room, after the lottery, looked like a site of explosive violence. Pizza sauce streaked the walls, congealed bits of flesh-colored pizza lay strewn on the beds. The keg lay on its side, as if, once depleted of beer, it had perished. Having never seemed alive, it now resembled nothing so much as something dead. Crumpled napkins covered the floor like peach blossoms after the Battle of Shiloh. Tommy began to clean immediately, before Myron had an opportunity to ask or exhort him to clean. Tommy did not mind work, but he disliked being asked or told to work. If Myron had said to Tommy, “Let’s get this place cleaned up,” Tommy would have immediately become sullen and insolent, but if he could begin on his own initiative, he could labor assiduously. Myron, who also did not like to be asked or told to do work, immediately left the room to get a trash can before Tommy could ask him to go find a trash can. He found one in the vending alcove, which clicked and hummed. He had to step over the legs of a man from Prestige Vista Solutions, who sat on the floor, chanting lifelessly into his phone, “But that does not make any sense.” Myron filled the trash can while Tommy scrubbed the walls with a white washcloth that almost instantly turned pink. The activities began as a kind of race, but each man slowed as he realized that the race’s winner would be forced to clean the bathroom, an unpleasant task. The problem with doing your work fast was that you made more work for yourself. Myron finished first, but then left the room with his trash can, staying gone, Tommy thought, for a suspiciously long time. Tommy draped the keg with a towel, then trudged alone into the bathroom.

  Later, their space tidy if not dry or fragrant, Tommy and Myron sat in chairs on opposite sides of the room, throwing a football and talking about public education. Myron’s kids’ school’s library’s roof had collapsed under the weight of snow last winter. Tommy’s kid’s teacher’s aide was someone he could not stop thinking about. Because he called her “striking” and “pretty,” because he talked about her “features” and her “figure,” Tommy did not sound creepy to Myron, nor to himself. It was but a partial and genteel confession of his depravity, and it trailed off into silence and obscene ideation. The men did not need to talk because they were throwing and catching a football. Or, if they chose, they could talk about throwing and catching a football. Eventually, of course, one man sat beneath the window and tried to time his throw so that the other man, running from the door, could make a diving catch on the queen bed. They alternated positions. Both men became flushed and sweaty. Neither man cared to remember the year that Vince broke the corner off of a bedside table. Both went about the game with gravity and good-natured intensity. It was important to them to throw and catch the ball well.

  “Nice one.”

  “My fault, bad throw.”

  “The one-handed grab!”

  “I suck.”

  “That one will no doubt be reviewed.”

  “I used to be able to do that.”

  “Lead me a little more next time.”

  “Crap.”

  “Whoa.”<
br />
  “You okay?”

  “Nice one.”

  “Got my bell rung.”

  “Hold on.”

  “Broke the plane!”

  “It went in the closet, I think.”

  “Fearless over the middle.”

  “I have to blow my nose.”

  “That’s it.”

  “On a roll now.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “That was my bad.”

  The wall sconce was chipped, but functional. The men quit their game, and prepared for bed. They texted their wives, brushed their teeth. Fat Michael had still not returned. Tommy and Myron got into the same queen-size bed. Myron asked Tommy if he wanted to read, and they both laughed. Myron turned off the light. Tommy, it seemed to Myron, fell asleep immediately. He had never seen someone fall asleep so quickly.

  In the faint red glow of the alarm clock, Myron could see the empty bed they had left for Fat Michael. It was customary for the man playing Theismann to sleep alone. It was intended to be a perk, or a compensation, but it had always seemed to Myron to be mildly punitive, a form of exile or symbolic estrangement. Myron, who six or seven years ago had been Theismann, imagined Fat Michael slipping into bed later tonight. He knew what it was like. Now Myron, feeling Tommy’s warmth beside him, remembered so very clearly that time after the birth of his first child. He remembered tucking her in at night, leaving her alone in the dark of her room. It had always seemed odd to him, somehow unfair or backward, that the adults could sleep together at night for warmth and comfort, while the child, fearful and lonely, had to sleep by herself.

  IN BED, in the dark, Andy and Robert talked quietly about injuries. Robert’s neighbor had sliced himself wickedly with a hedge trimmer. There had been blood on the roof. Andy knew it didn’t sound like much, but he had ended up in the ER because of a splinter from his back deck. Both men had been laid out with back spasms. Both men found themselves using the railing when they climbed stairs. Neither man could put on socks while standing up. They had both lived in the paradise of a painless body for years without even realizing it. The inglorious body had become, for Robert and Andy, one of life’s most prominent themes. They often woke up sore, scanning their minds for possible causes. Each man in the bed cupped his genitals, not for arousal but for comfort.