The Throwback Special

by Chris Bachelder

  3:15: Gil

  When Peter emerged into the hallway, Gil obligatorily made fun of his haircut, then knocked on the door of Carl’s room. Carl opened the door, and nodded hello. Gil sat down in the chair, located between the two beds. Beneath the chair Carl had spread out four white hotel towels. Both men were mildly embarrassed by the sudden realization that they would face each other that evening in a battle of strength and agility, albeit a ceremonial one with assumed identities and a predetermined outcome. Carl placed the heavy cape on Gil. They both looked straight forward, as if into a mirror. The heating and cooling unit ticked and clanked. Carl winced as he absentmindedly prodded the tender lump with the comb. He gave Gil an opportunity to say what he wanted, but Gil said nothing, so Carl tilted Gil’s head down and began to cut the hair on the back of his head with clippers. The cord of the clippers was a taut line, but it did not pull out of the wall socket. Gil closed his eyes, as if in prayer. The vibration of the clippers felt nice along his cranium. He could hear the men in the hallway, laughing and shouting, passing the long afternoon. Two voices rose above the others. To Gil it sounded as if George and Steven were hashing something out, though he could not discern the subject, nor did he wish to. Their tone and cadence—adversarial, intimate—carried much more meaning than their words, which were probably inane. The loud discussion through a wall, combined perhaps with the weather, made him sleepy and nostalgic. Gil had a long drive the next day. He loved his family, but he didn’t want to go home. He was having fun—though fun may not have been the right word. He was happy here—though happy may not have been the right word.

  3:30: Nate

  “Is it true about Adam?” Nate asked.

  A barber, even one isolated in a hotel room, was expected to know things.

  “I don’t know,” Carl said.

  From his wallet Nate produced a photograph of his children, posed in an artificial bower. The girl was skinny, with dark circles beneath her eyes, and she clung like a castaway to the gleaming trunk of a synthetic tree.

  “Nice,” Carl said.

  “Turns out she was allergic to that plastic bark,” Nate said. “She’s allergic to everything, though. When we were kids, Carl—do you remember?—there was one, maybe two allergies.”

  “Bees,” Carl said, trimming the hair above Nate’s ear.

  “That’s right,” Nate said. He seemed to be making a moral argument. “There was that kid who bragged that he would die if he got stung. Then there was pollen, and maybe cats. And that was it. That was all. And now I’ve got a kid who is allergic to crayons and dust.”

  Carl stood and moved behind Nate’s chair. He nodded, though there was no mirror.

  “Aren’t we supposed to become better adapted through generations?” Nate said. He sounded troubled. He seemed to be suggesting that children today did not share our values.

  Out in the hallway, something or someone slammed hard against the door, and the men laughed and coughed. Then Nate told a story. The story began with a kind of rustling or scuttling sound in the basement. Carl gritted his teeth. God help me, he thought, this is going to be a story about an animal in the house. Carl had been at the hotel for a little more than twenty-four hours, and he had already heard six or seven stories about animals in houses, identical in dramatic contour—the strange noise or scat or smell, the mystery, the false hypothesis, the persistence, the breakthrough, the discovery, the grim and triumphant resolution. The unstated moral: It’s my house. But Carl tried to be patient, he did. He understood that each animal in each house felt unique to the home owner. A man with an animal in his house is an archetype. He joins a long narrative tradition, and yet for each particular man in each particular house the event is not allegory. It is an urgent and singular encounter, exceptional and unrepeatable. Carl remembered very clearly the bats in his own attic. Those terrible little fingers. He knew that each man was entitled to his story about an animal in the house, and he tried to pay attention, tried to nod and sound surprised when it turned out to be a raccoon. “Are you serious?” Carl said. “What did you do then?” Nate had good hair, and it was a pleasure to cut. He had, at least in the decade that Carl had known him, always parted his hair in the middle. It was time, Carl thought, for a change.

  3:45: Adam

  (Carl was worried that he was dying, though he was not. He stood in his room by the door. He could hear the men in the hallway—it must be nearly all of them, maybe more—but nobody knocked. He placed his clippers on top of the television. His hands were covered with graying hair and streaks of black marker. He walked to the window, and looked out at the parking lot. The sky had descended, and seemed now to rest upon the hotel, raining upon it. The day was growing dark, and Carl pulled the curtains together. The sign-up sheet was posted on the outside of the room’s door, and Carl did not know which men were waiting in line, or how many. He did not necessarily enjoy cutting hair anymore, if he ever did, but he continued out of a sense of obligation. He put three pills on his tongue, sprayed water into his mouth from the spray bottle. He lay on his bed and closed his eyes. He should not have attended his high school reunion last month. That had been a mistake. The best-case scenario was that Carl was halfway through his life. It was alternately a comfort and a terror to consider that you were halfway through your life, but at any rate it was not an accurate concept. You were never actually halfway through your life. Not really. Not in the sense that you were halfway though a cord of winter firewood, or a tank of gas, or a trip home from the beach, or the one cocktail you allowed yourself on a weeknight. Halfway through something, that is, whose wholeness is a given, preexistent. You were always, instant by instant, at the very edge of your life, at the end of it, in its entirety, and so never at any point, Carl considered, in the middle. Adam did not show up. Perhaps the rumor was true. It would certainly not be the first time that a man had been retrieved, though this time felt more grave, Carl thought. He imagined an automotive fleet in tight highway formation, steadily approaching the hotel. A wave of relations, each determined to find a man and bring him home.)

  4:00: Randy

  Randy sat in the chair between the beds. The chair was now encircled by a thick ring of cut hair. He felt as if he were in a nest. Carl sprayed Randy’s hair, and combed it straight forward. Water dripped from Randy’s nose. Carl leaned down in front of Randy to cut the bangs across Randy’s forehead. Randy confessed, as Carl knew he would. He told Carl the truth about the Jeff Bostic uniform. “It’s true that I sold it,” he said, telling the story from the beginning, or well before it. And in the six minutes he had remaining in his appointment, he had other things to tell Carl, as well. In forty-six years Randy had done any number of things of which he was ashamed. There was nothing interesting, nothing unusual. Carl had heard it all many times. Randy had lied, he had stolen, he had cheated, he had hurt people who loved him. He had once peed in a bottle of Mellow Yellow, knowing full well his older sister would ask him for a drink . . . If he wanted, Randy, like everyone else, could tell his life story as an outright spree of wickedness and deceit.

  4:15: Dennis

  Dennis was a business traveler, staying alone on the second floor. He sat quietly for his trim. Out in the hallway, the men had dispersed, leaving behind some trash and a notable silence. Carl concentrated on the hair of Dennis, and he cut well, though it depleted him. Dennis’s cough drop gradually filled the room with its scent of medicine and childhood. The smell had not changed in decades. It must be the case that people did not actually want cough drops to taste like cherry, like lemon. In the absence of much ambient noise, the smell of the cough drop began nearly to drone. Suddenly, Dennis said something. He asked Carl if he would mind trimming his eyebrows. Carl could think of no reason to refuse, and he trimmed the eyebrows, holding his breath to steady his hands. When the appointment was over, Carl wiped Dennis’s neck and ears with a towel. He carefully removed the cape. “There you go,” he said, as barbers do. Dennis nodded, stood. For some time he stared at a wat
ercolor of horses in a pasture, as if at a mirror. Carl sat on the bed. Dennis reached for his wallet, and Carl braced himself for more photographs of children. It was more than he could handle. Dennis removed fourteen dollars from his wallet, and placed the bills on the bedside table.

  4:30: Michael

  Fat Michael entered the room as Dennis left. He saw Carl sitting on the bed, shoulder against the headboard, eyes closed, mouth open, scissors dangling from his finger. He was either asleep or pretending to be asleep, and there was no real difference that Fat Michael could determine. The amount of cut hair on the floor was disconcerting, unseemly. The room was a scene of unpleasant fecundity, as one might discover beneath a rock or a rotting log. Fat Michael thought it distasteful that the men should have left so much of themselves here, as if they had molted. Slowly, Carl’s shoulder slid down the headboard. He lay on the bed on his back with his feet still on the floor. The scissors dropped to the carpet. Fat Michael’s hair really wasn’t that long, anyway. He didn’t need a cut, and he didn’t think much of Carl’s skills as a barber. He had just signed up to fill out the schedule, so that Carl wouldn’t feel bad. He picked up Carl’s scissors from the floor. They did not seem like good scissors. The blades rattled loosely, and small spots of rust dotted the handles. Fat Michael considered that the men should pitch in to buy Carl a new pair, or perhaps a whole new barber’s kit. When was Carl’s birthday? He glanced around for Carl’s wallet, but did not see it. Fat Michael’s birthday was today, but nobody knew it. He had never mentioned it, and he couldn’t very well mention it now, after so many years. He put the scissors on the chair, and left the room quietly. He knew the men would never buy Carl a new barber’s kit. It was enough to imagine the generosity.

  THE YEAR Jeff brought his girlfriend; the year nobody brought a football; the year Trent slept in the lobby; the flu year; the food poisoning year; the year the conference room had just been painted; the year that George was Theismann; the year that George was commissioner; the year that George was Taylor; 2001; the year Myron forgot to make room reservations; the year Vince shocked himself with the toaster; the year the linebackers got stuck on the roof; the very first year; the year the smokers found that big box of fireworks by the dumpster; the year Wesley dropped his watch in the fountain; the year Steven got so drunk and stole a ladder; the year that Tommy disappeared for a good long while; the year of the flight attendants; the year that Adam called Gil in the middle of the night, pretending to be the real Theismann; the snow year; the lightning year; the year Charles lost his shit; the year Fat Michael lost his wedding ring; the year Randy broke his wrist; the year Nate dislocated his elbow; the year of Bald Michael’s toupee; the year Fancy Drum was vandalized; the year Derek’s car was vandalized; the years that guy Danny had to fill in as a substitute, and kept trying to sell the rest of the men those specialty candles; the year the newspaper reporter was supposed to come; the year the cops came and arrested the night desk clerk; the year of the hot wings contest; the year that Robert was not the first to arrive; the year Carl fumbled the snap; the year the hotel ran out of breakfast; the year the hotel ran out of hot water; the year Nate’s wife went into labor; the year of babies; the year Gary made his big announcement; the year of the carbon dioxide dragsters.

  Myron, Gil, and Tommy sat on a couch in the lobby, waiting for others to come down for dinner. All three had heard birds flying smack into their glass patio doors. All three were just praying their kids would get scholarships. The fountain was half full, and gurgling unhealthily.

  Jerry, the transportation director for Prestige Vista Solutions, walked past the men on the couch and wished them good luck this evening. The men nodded, thanked Jerry.

  “Big night,” Jerry said.

  The men concurred. Myron had a startled expression on his face.

  “Last year, right?” Jerry said.

  Gil took off his reading glasses, and cleaned them with his shirt. The elevator bell rang twice. Tommy stared down at his hands, folded in his lap. Myron said, “What?”

  “This is the last year, right?” Jerry said.

  “Who told you that?” Gil said.

  “A guy yesterday,” Jerry said. “I don’t know his name. Guy with a chinstrap. Was it some kind of secret?”

  The men shook their heads. “No,” Myron said. “Of course not.”

  “Take it easy,” Jerry said, walking toward the automatic doors of the lobby. “Have fun.”

  The fountain gurgled. The desk clerk read Dune. The bright, enormous clock bathed the entire lobby in time. Each of the three men on the couch assumed that the other two men had known, that he was the only one who had not. Each felt the sting of exclusion, the ancient wound, before anger rushed in like an antibody. Why had he not been told? Why had he been treated like a child? They sat in silence, staring up at the television, the muted anchors. Each man was indignant. Beneath the indignation there was an exotic and diverse world of feeling, as dark as an ocean trench.

  BY CUSTOM the men ate dinner with positional mates. By custom they made their way in clusters down the dirt path along the service road, ducking under the heavy wet branches of evergreens. By custom they ate inexpensive food with sauce packets. By custom they ate in silence. There was, after all, no reason to say that Theismann’s right leg remains to this day shorter than his left, or that the sound by his own account was like two muzzled gunshots or that the surgeons at Arlington Hospital had to wash the wound dozens of times with saline solution in an attempt to prevent infection. (“You start with a gallon,” one of the surgeons said, and the men did not.) There was no need to say that Theismann described the injury as a kind of death, followed by rebirth. Straws squeaked inside the lids of fountain drinks. Boys within the plastic tunnels of the restaurant’s Play Zone taunted other boys, and then injured themselves attempting to flee. By tradition the man playing Theismann and the man playing Taylor stayed away from each other, like a bride and groom before a wedding. Nobody ate all that much.

  Back in their rooms, the men helped each other pull jerseys over shoulder pads. They helped each other tape fingers and wrists, tie shoelaces. By tradition, each man would drive to Warren G. Harding Middle School alone. Nobody would carpool. They left the hotel in full uniform, carrying their wallets and keys inside their helmets. That sound, vaguely martial, was their cleats across the parking lot.

  - 6 -

  THE PLAY

  “WAIT, DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHERE IT IS?”

  “It’s supposed to be over here.”

  “Is it a stadium?”

  “No, it’s a field at a middle school. We’re close.”

  “A football field?”

  “Yes.”

  “Middle schools have football fields?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Why would a middle school need a football field?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “New Hampshire.”

  “There are lights over there.”

  “Where?”

  “See the lights?”

  Brandon turned left at a stoplight, and drove his Toyota through the wet streets toward the distant yellow glow of a light tower. Sarah sat in the passenger seat beside Brandon, smoothing the suitcase folds out of her jeans. Paul and Deirdre sat in the back with not enough leg room. They were all young sale associates for Prestige Vista Solutions, two or three years out of college. After a day in the conference room, they felt like falsely convicted inmates exonerated by DNA evidence. The interior of the sedan was humid with fertility and body spray. The seat belts seemed like a form of sexual restraint, a precaution. Deirdre put her cheek against the cold glass of the window. At a stoplight a man in an expensive car smiled at her, and waved. She did not smile back or wave, but she received his attention, and kept it.

  All of the young sale associates agreed, riding through the night, that the new commissions program would be excellent if they got a lot of sales, less desirable if they did not. They all privately liked Kevin,
the team leader, but they laughed about the sweat stains, the pants, the screensaver of the ugly baby and the dog.

  “There’s the parking lot,” Paul said.

  “Do we need tickets or anything?” Sarah said.

  “I doubt it.”

  Only the women had umbrellas. They offered to share them, but the men declined. Sarah found a ring of wet keys on the ground next to a car, and she rested them on the handle of the driver’s-side door. Paul cradled a backpack beneath the front of his jacket as they walked toward the field, where football players stretched and jogged and performed jumping jacks beneath rain and low wisps of fog. The grass was patchy and brown, dotted with dark puddles. It was not lined with chalk. A distant goalpost lay on its side in the mud, mired like a mastodon in a tar pit. Two leaning light towers draped a feeble glow onto the field, accentuating the vast darkness beyond. At the far end of the field a scoreboard with missing lights showed seven points for the home team and seven for the visitor, with an indecipherable number of minutes remaining in what appeared to be the second quarter. Above the scoreboard a wooden sign welcomed fans to the Falcons Nest, and beneath it stood a man in a yellow poncho. In the cold rain, alone beneath a dilapidated scoreboard and a grammatical error, the man had the posture of one who was enduring a severe test of faith from a higher power.

  Several long wooden benches ran crookedly along one sideline. On the other sideline there was a narrow block of aluminum bleachers, which wobbled and creaked as the young sales associates climbed to the top row. “Luxury box,” Brandon said. Sarah had thought to bring two hotel towels, and she wiped the bench dry. The four sat close together beneath the two feminine umbrellas, their pockets buzzing intermittently with text messages from their boyfriends and girlfriends back home. They were all conscious of attempting to have a memorable night, and of having one.