Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  Copyright

  The Borough Press

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

  Copyright © Gabe Habash 2017

  Cover illustration © George Boorujy

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

  Gabe Habash asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

  Source ISBN: 9780008265090

  Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008265113

  Version: 2017-05-23

  Dedication

  To Julie

  Epigraph

  The mind is the limit.

  —ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  My mother had …

  My name is …

  They call me …

  Practice is only …

  Students teachers desks …

  On the night …

  I don’t have …

  We find a …

  Mary Bethstands …

  In the locker …

  I am in …

  A time begins …

  At the last …

  Same shirt, same …

  Nephew Shane drives …

  The truth is …

  Mary Beth sends …

  In my room …

  Hargraves drives me …

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  MY MOTHER HAD TWO PLACENTAS and I was living off both of them. I was supposed to have a twin. When the doctor yanked me out, he said, “There’s a good chance this child will be quite strong.” This is the story my parents always told me, but I never really believed it.

  In a moment, after I refasten the Velcro over my laces, I will stand up out of this folding chair. I will square my bulge in my singlet and good-luck tug each shoulder strap. And after I’ve counted the spectators in the bleachers (seventeen), I will ask Coach Hargraves to box my headgear. He will oblige. Then I will walk onto the maroon mat, enter the white circle, shake this Poor Richard’s hand, and when the referee lets me go, I will come after him with everything I have. Noise. And in the second it takes for me to hold the pin, I will hear something snap in his arm. This is like breathing.

  You haven’t spent any time in North Dakota, but if you had, you’d know this time of year is useful for airing out your head. I will use three minutes outside in the parking lot to stand by a snow clump, watching for birds and settling down, thinking how it’s finally November and the season won’t be over until March, thinking about my weak, sweaty good-bye to the whole thing before it gets sucked inside me for good.

  I once read about the idea of internal age in my Teams & Group Dynamics class. I got a C+ in that. Imagine: there’s a tight little peach-pit core inside you with a number carved into it, and that number is the age of your best self. Most of the time people whine about not being at or being past their internal age. Not me. I’m in my golden age.

  I believe in wrestling, and I believe in the United States of America.

  I am a motherfucking astronaut.

  MY NAME IS STEPHEN FLORIDA and I’m going to win the Division IV NCAA Championship in the 133 weight class.

  That’s it. Do you believe me when I say I think about it every day, every hour, at least twenty times an hour? That there isn’t much in the way of detail? I’m telling the truth. I can lie, but I wouldn’t lie about this. When you want something bad enough to starve for it, it’s not clear what it’ll look like until it finally happens. I know that there’s a white pedestal with eight steps and that you pose for the photographers with your wooden trophy, which is the exact same size as a nice desk clock. This happens in a place called Kenosha Arena in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where there are six mats of all different colors and the seats are blue and all two thousand are filled up with people. Below the arena is a basement with old lights and enough space for each of the wrestlers, winners and losers, to find his own shadowy corner to cry in because he’s happy or because his season’s over. It’s where everyone goes when it’s over. It’s tradition. But that’s not for a while, and I’m not there yet.

  Can you believe I used to share this with people when I was a dumb freshman and thought I’d pull the sword right from the stone? Now I keep things to myself. I edit and develop in my own mind. If someone wanted to know about it, I figure they’d ask, but I have a shaved head and a face that appears mean in repose and I’m quick to anger, which is something I got from my dad, which helps me out in wrestling but not in interpersonal communications. I took a class on that, too.

  I don’t get ahead of myself now. It’s something I’ve been working on. But I still think about the arena, the mats, the pedestal. I can’t help it. I have ecstatic visions of climbing down into the basement. I think about them when I’m riding in the team van, when I fold my laundry, when I tear off my scabs, when I take a shit, when I’m sitting through a lecture in an overheated classroom, pretending I’m looking down at my textbook, but really have my eyes closed in a low-level doze of distant concentration.

  I’m thinking about them right now. One day, everyone will know who I am.

  Why, if I pull this off, they could tell my story in the New York Times!

  Whenever I’m not thinking about them, I think about how to get them. Ideas are just neurons in your brain squirting chemicals at other neurons. Do you have dreams of arm bars and front headlocks? The special squeaks and thumps heard in practice, which is the sound of your own flesh’s wet exertion? Have you looked for a long moment at a splotch of sweat on the mat and decided to lick it up, only because it came from inside you? Do you practice your stances, hobbling around like a Quasimodo by yourself, until your knees lock up? Do you think of hair as a vanity? Do you fucking distract yourself with a five-hundred-page Barron’s SAT Vocabulary book, guaranteed to boost your Verbal score one hundred points on test day?

  But, as I said, it’s important not to get ahead of oneself, and so I grip down on my bench in the locker room and screw my eyes to my surroundings, because life is only the present. The red lockers and the two dozen guys in here, the coaches standing around with their arms folded, that’s the present. The red walls, the bench sticking to my skin, that’s the present. The fifty years of dead and alive men that have been in this locker room, they’re the past. They each had a moment to matter, but they don’t anymore. What matters is that smell of a bunch of derma oxidizing, that smell like a line of wet aluminum bleachers, that’s also the present.

  “Stephen gets an extra piece of chicken at dinner for breaking that kid’s arm.”

  Coach Hargraves is a nice man but I don’t
listen to him. The year my coach told me to “envision the perfect match, and then strive to materialize it,” I lost more matches than any other year. Now I conserve the energy I’d use listening, save it for myself, while in front of me Hargraves’s glottal hum hits around my ears and my brain skitters down. Simpleminded thoughts stand up in my head, like flowers, like individual top-heavy sunflowers that bow and slump over when they can no longer take the weight. Next to Hargraves are the assistants. Eerik, Fink, Whiting, Farrow, and Lee. I don’t really distinguish between them until one occasionally separates from the others. They stand in a line in their white shirts with the little red George Washington head on their breasts, “Presidents Assistant Coach.” Can anyone imagine them going home to their children? Having private hopes? Crying at classical music? I can’t.

  “Florida?”

  “Mm?”

  “I just said, any words of encouragement? For the young guys?”

  I shake my head, shrug, keep shaking my head.

  On the big chalkboard, Coach made us all write our classes down. I don’t know why. One of the coaches, I don’t know which one, gave us all cassette tapes with mood sounds we’re meant to listen to in our sleep. They all keep talking about “community accountability,” which is the theory that you are more likely to be true to yourself and reach higher if you don’t want to let your herd down (animal comparisons are often made around here). This is to scare wrestlers into not being the weak link, but I’m not the weak link, I’m not a part of the herd at all, I look out for myself and that takes all my effort and all my time. Inside the locker next to mine (now Ellis’s), it says in very old writing Who wants to see my pentis. The locker four down once belonged to Mycah something, we only had one year overlap, and the whole time, he was about to quit because he couldn’t bear his mat herpes. They badgered and guilted him into staying. The locker two down (now Sherman’s) was Flores’s last year and for the three years before, the whole span during which he kept growing, a Mexican farmboy from Illinois who kept growing and measuring his height in rising marker lines on the inside of his locker. He went from 133 to 157 during his time at Oregsburg. I haven’t heard from him since May. No one has. Flores, who had small feet and bad teeth and apologized beforehand for his halitosis, who gave ojo to at least three of his teachers, who went back to Illinois and just got swallowed up forever.

  Quietly, something is being passed around the room.

  There’s a problem where I always want to put my fingers in my mouth, especially if I have to sit still in one place. Rolling the ridges of your knuckles over your slightly parted jaws is a sensory pleasure you can get anytime you like. It’s good sometimes to have your face against something harder than itself. That way you’re never surprised by how hard contact is. If you believe the universe is a place of hitting, where one thing collides with another, the pattern repeating all over, your arms turn to cradles and you begin to want something to root you to your senses. I’m not saying it always has to be violent. My grandma had a tabby cat named Poker she found as a stray, and he liked getting in my lap and I was always giving him the ear pets he liked.

  “We’re going to Miles City in just three days,” Hargraves says.

  Miles City is a place of buildings and people. It’s in Montana. There will be a quad where I have to wrestle three times in four hours. It helps to tell yourself these basic things because it establishes a mind-set for completing them. The fastest pin in history is nine seconds. I rub the divots of old scars on my forehead, the place between my eyes where I felt a tiny painful pebble under my skin two years ago and was afraid I had a very problematic neurological growth, a tumor or stroke pebble that would kill me before I had a chance to get to Kenosha. I went to the student health center to prevent a tragedy and when I expressed my situation, I was told it was a pimple.

  Linus drapes a towel over his head. He rolls a lacrosse ball around under his left foot for his plantar fasciitis, which he got in high school from cross-country and bad shoes, which everyone knows never fully goes away. He won his match today. He’s thinking about going home to read. To read! I’m thinking about that one field east of Dickinson on the way to Miles City where you see a red-winged blackbird on each and every post.

  Fink or Farrow adds something to what Hargraves just finished saying.

  Coach Whiting notices the object being passed by the wrestlers but pretends not to. Some of them are looking at it for longer than others. It’s coming around the room toward me.

  It’s very difficult not to think about the banana sitting in my locker behind me! I need something for my mouth. I promise myself the banana later. I’ve never made a promise I didn’t keep, I’ve made the promise to myself and to my grandma to win my championship. Up in an armpit of the United States, where no one can see me, I change shapes and become something slobbering and furious in order to get what I want.

  I’ve been jogging my leg this whole fucking time. I sit still to end the attention I’m drawing.

  I live in the luckiest place on earth. The papers have called it that. It’s true. The only thing that’s expected of me is the only thing I want to do. That is called luck. Luck is to own a thicker meaning of existence, a place inside you shelled off from flabby friends and exhaustion without purpose: I’m on a one-lane road in a thick metaphorical forest with no distractions. Everything I do is intentional. To arrive at the end of the road is to know Glory in the biblical sense, to put your paternity in Glory. I walk around, putting my paternity on things. I haven’t studied much on the saints, but it sounds exactly like what their lives were like. At the end of his good works St. Bartholomew was misunderstood and skinned alive. Up to the present they’ve hung on to bits of his bones and skin in basilicas, and his arm is in a cathedral. With all of the saints, you see their cartoons smudged on papyrus with all kinds of bright colors shooting out of nowhere around them, and sometimes I believe that if you look hard enough, you can see those colors in the real world.

  I don’t have any secrets. I’m not hiding anything. My parents both died in a car crash when I was fourteen, and I went to live with my grandma. She died of heart disease. I told her when she was dying that I was going to Oregsburg, that I was going to wrestle, and she put all her money with my parents’ policy, and Rudy Unger, the estate lawyer my parents set me up with, holds on to it and tells me what to do with it.

  The note’s at Sherman now. He glances at it, then passes it to Ucher.

  My grandma didn’t care much about wrestling, but she knew what it meant to me and so it made her happy. I told her I was going to break off a piece of my championship trophy and bury it next to her. By the end, she was barely giving a shit about any goddamn thing, but she was a good Christian and could appreciate the Old Testament ceremony of it, so I guess it made her happy.

  And if we’re on the topic of confessions, I might as well: I have been here three years and failed. I don’t like to use the words “last chance,” but I’m not delusional. This is my last chance to do what I promised. It’s been so long since I’ve felt it that I’ve forgotten what choice feels like. There are scientists in the polar circles and missionaries in Micronesia, these people choose to be put in foreign, forgotten places for science or God service, and they can lean over the rim of renounced free will, they kneel down in the church and say, “I’m ready to hear about what God has in mind for me!” and get the water sprinkled on their heads. I am in North Dakota, in a town called Aiken, which you have never heard of, and I am only here for myself. Even an idiot knows you can’t accomplish anything meaningful without the possibility of failure. My three-year failure will be totally forgotten in the face of a fourth-year success, which is always, always what gets remembered.

  Ucher hands it to me. I cross my legs and look down at it in the hidden bowl of my lap. It’s a white napkin that says in black ink: Something needs to be done about Louise. I don’t pass it on, which would be to Linus, I crumple it up and drop it on the floor, under the bench.

&nb
sp; Choice is a perfect gift, and in modern times more people have it. They teach you all that shit in class. Because there are more options nowadays, someone can walk away from what troubles them. But not me. I’m locked into myself, I’m locked into my five months, I’ve been locked in, waiting for them my whole life. I want the trouble. It’s what I promised. I promised my grandma. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone nor would I want anything different.

  Hargraves says, “Kill the head and the body will die.”

  THEY CALL ME and Linus faggots jokingly to our faces and less jokingly behind our backs. They call us that because we skip out early from the chicken dinner (each wrestler takes a single chicken breast—Fat Henry gets two—some vegetables, yogurt, an apple, and maximum twenty ounces of water), which is prepared for the team by Eerik’s wife and Lee’s wife, two coaches’ wives who like to cook our primitive meals for us together, but they don’t call those nice ladies faggots. Faggots don’t give birth to quarter-Arikara children in Eerik’s case, white children in Lee’s, cook for their husbands’ team and feel good about it in their straight hearts. Only the two best wrestlers on the team, which we are, get called faggots.

  I leave after eating, quickly, because I really hate eating in front of other people. I’d rather be alone, and being with Linus is the same as being alone but also a fix for loneliness, a positive solitude. Linus leaves with me because he’s my friend.

  Linus is five four with thin eyebrows and acne. I met him when he was trying to take the 125 spot from Slim John Carpenter, which he did, quite quickly. A lot of times you see young guys come in and not really work too hard, not really know what it takes to get what you want—they don’t realize it until later, or not at all. Not Linus. He took 125 from Carpenter, rolled him over, cradled him in the first week of practice. He’s a freshman, the only weight class smaller than me, the only person on the team where being with him makes me forget to wonder what being lifeless would be like. He knew what he wanted as soon as he came through the door, and rapidly made them all look lazy. I tell him he’s too wise for his own good. I tease him for his vanity because he gets his ears drained by Fink after his matches, something he insists on despite the fact his nose is bent to the right from a bike accident. “Everyone loves my face and my personality,” he brags. He has a room down the hall, but he likes to sit in the chair in mine, leaning back on two legs and squeaking it, just to make himself feel less homesick.