Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  I make myself smarter with books. Every day, when I come home from practice, I read the scholarly text-based articles for my What Is Nothing? class or bone up on the synoptic scale. When I’ve had enough, when the fizz gets too high, I do something to sweat it away. Then I come back and sit down at the desk again. There’s always noise outside my door but I don’t bother with any of it. A sentence I encountered one night for homework said, “(A proposition can, indeed, be an incomplete picture of a certain state of affairs, but it is always a complete picture.)” It also said, “It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest course of events will really happen.”

  Where I run into trouble is the little cracks of time that won’t be filled by wrestling or studying. One week after Miles City, just before Thanksgiving, I sit in the chair at midnight in my room, trying out blind contours on things out my window. There have been no more notes put under my door. I sketch the tree, whatever varietal tree that is, in the ghoul light from the path’s walking lamps. My drawing looks like something a dumb person forced to draw would’ve drawn. I have a complete, unbidden erection in my sweatpants. I haven’t had an orgasm since after my last match last season. From what I remember it feels like a doorknob turning open. In high school, I got two handjobs from a small girl the year above me named Tiffany. And if Tiffany sounds like the name of a girl who would give you exactly two handjobs, then let it be known she preferred to be called Tiff, and though I was 122 pounds at the time, I would’ve broken the jaw of any dingfuck who touched her. I liked her O.K. but her hand could’ve been anyone’s hand, I didn’t need hers, in particular, really.

  At Oregsburg, I haven’t had anything last past three or four days since they usually move on when they realize I don’t have any time. A summary of my romantic encounters:

  Three years ago, they had a cotillion in the gym for freshman athletes. They put up red and white streamers and dimmed the lights and played bad music. It was meant to foster fraternal feelings between the males and females. The central activity was they gave you a frilly card with the name of an opposite-sex athlete and their sport, and the game was to find that person. I got a card that said “Megan Volleyball.” I walked to the other side of the gym holding my card, where a cluster of the volleyball team was sitting on the bleachers. I asked one after the other. “Are you Megan?” Eventually, I found her. “Are you Megan?” She was way taller than me, I could tell even sitting down that she was. “Yes,” she said.

  “Who’s on your card?” I said.

  She opened her card, clearly for the first time. “Well, aren’t you Stephen?”

  I said, “My name is on your card?”

  And when she squinted at me, I recognized I hadn’t fully grasped the style of the game. I looked around the gym, the other males were not bluntly questioning the females, in fact, no one even had their cards out. Many were dancing to the outrageous music. The cards were a pretense to get us all talking, frippery and a last resort, and no one needed them. I had thought they wanted me to be Megan’s swain.

  A nameless sophomore who when we kissed said, “What do you think?” and I scared away by saying, “Time to fucking circle the wagons.”

  A volleyball captain (who didn’t remember Megan, who had by then transferred, I heard, because of family issues), who I thought might work out since love is just finding someone exactly as crazy as you are. The captain used her teeth quite freely. We made each other feel special for a little while.

  The last time I was intimate was fourteen months ago when a junior named Meredith smashed me against a wall and worked me around a bit.

  Various other minor physical frictions and affectionate transactions.

  But that’s all water under the bridge. I believe I’ve matured. For instance, after my last match freshman season, I came back to my room and in an extended spell of frustration masturbated seven times, I wanted it all out of me, until I couldn’t anymore and it started to feel needless. But I don’t do that anymore, I’ve grown up from all that.

  I get up, put my sweatshirt and Ponies on.

  An ongoing problem is this: What can I do with myself when I can’t make myself better? A jog is always a sensible choice, so I head outside into the dark. It’s a Saturday, bass from stereos coming through walls and windows along with occasional laughing. My next match isn’t until December 7. It will be against Joseph Carver, the 133 Konstantin College will trot out, and I haven’t even seen a picture of him but the excessive waiting time guarantees a valuable meeting experience. The two weeks until then pass in stupid, small doses. I’m running faster, and it’s not for any other reason than it’s something I have control over so I want to use it. I am running fast enough that I can outrun my spit. I wonder what Mary Beth’s contours are of. The erection tries to return, but I’m running and it loses.

  Small dots of light in windows are the only signs of life, and I’m thankful I have the main path to myself, thinning to a single presence in sweatpants, jogging out frustration, as though on the moon, the oval-shaped campus and the roads on the fringes where the grass and dirt stop and cars do not slow down. My blue and white and yellow and green existence.

  The student union is empty, the TV is on. I’m not asshole enough to pretend I didn’t come by on the off chance Masha is doing the trash. Maybe next time, I guess.

  I cover the left nostril and blow out the right. I lick my teeth. If I had hair the wind would be blowing it around right now. A bunch of loops, a bunch of practice grab-ass for incremental progress, days upon days of small progress, days of my body becoming more and more alive. All the days with the leash off, I make something of every one of them. I’ll never quit, sweat blotching my sweatshirt, lung burn, chest burn, leg burn.

  Memorial’s rooms run in a straight line, two floors that look like a long prison row, classroom doors exposed to the elements and a rail on the upper floor. I hit the stairs and head up to the second floor and, because I have to go, decide the first bench is as good a spot as any to whiz from. My stream can take a little bit of time to start. And it is in that waiting time that I hear voices somewhere below. For the same reason I do everything, which is to see what’ll happen, I turn myself toward the rail and lean on tiptoes to fit my twiglet over the top, and the modest tide that emerges results not in the sound of whiz hitting pavement but of whiz hitting top of head, and the voices stop. When I do something particularly bad, like this, it feels like more than just one person is looking down on me.

  While I finish up, there’s what I take to be shocked silence. Like a cartoon, I imagine a line of steam rising up from below. Then a male voice screams, “Some pervert is peeing on us! Get him!” Fast footsteps as I flop it back inside the sweatpants and decamp.

  I experience no remorse for what I’ve just done, which is a pattern, because I can’t remember the last time I did something bad enough to inspire real, actual remorse.

  It’s good to run for a reason and being chased is one of the best. I do a full sprint around the upper rim of the college, and when I’m sure I’ve lost them I stop in a slim gap of Rainbow Building’s northern wall, where a pillar hides me from everything. I had my Greeks & Romans class here, on the other side of this curved wall, I was eighteen and sucking on the sour end of the carrot stick. My breath extends beyond the pillar, like air bubbles from a nasty lake predator popping on the surface. I hear more voices. Both sexes. A different group than the pursuers. Leaning forward, I put my open mouth on the pillar, moving my lips on the freezing stone circumference, and as the voices come closer, thinking of nice students unaware of what’s hiding up around the bend, I derive indescribable pleasure from mouthing a piece of architecture.

  When they pass, I fall in behind. There are six of them, all carrying six packs or wine bottles. We go around the curve of Rainbow, the girls wearing nice shoes, and I infer that we are on our way to a party. Because I’m quiet and they’re loud they don’t hear me coming up behind them. At least two are wearing perfume or cologne.


  There’s a little stretch of hedges on the path between Rainbow and Mooney Dormitory, and that’s where they turn. The last one, a male, holds the door for me. “Thank you,” I say. We cross the lobby. At the far end the elevator doors begin closing, but they see me coming and hold it open. I crowd in.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Who do you know up there?” a female says.

  “I’m in class with Mary Beth,” I say.

  “Oh! I’m in Tuesday-Thursday Ethics with her. You’re not in that one, right?”

  “No, I’m in Drawing.”

  “Are you an art student?”

  “No, I wrestle.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Stephen Florida.”

  By this time I’m already in the apartment, which is big and full of people and loud. These cotillions are what I’ve been missing every night around the place. I’m being taken by this girl, who has her hand around my bicep in a familiar fashion that brings about the return of the boner, through all these people until she stops me and tells this other girl, who’s name comes at the front end of the sentence and is blared out by the music, “—Stephen Florida. He’s the one in Emmy’s art class, the wrestler. Look at him.”

  Whereas the first girl, who has now disappeared, was pretty with darker hair, this one is pretty with lighter hair. “So you’re the wrestler,” she says. And before I can ask why she said “the” instead of “a,” she says, “You want to take your hat off? Your sweatshirt?”

  “Yeah.” Both come off.

  “Do you want me to put them someplace, wrestler?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll hold them.”

  “Suit yourself.” She points to the other end of the apartment, across all the people. “Emmy’s that way, in her room. She crashed pretty early.”

  I go into the party room. Something smells like body and feet. I realize it’s me. It’s about then that I notice sundry narcotics paraphernalia. Pills and powders on the counters and tables.

  Probably because of my smell, the partiers make room for me and the trip through the party room is easy. A male has found a lampshade somewhere and has it on his head. Someone hands me a beer, a green bottle, and the mind will play strange games with you—from holding a bottle, you will remember the running adolescent scheme you had collecting glass around your town in order to save up for a transistor radio, you will hear your mother saying no broken glass, and you will remember the feeling of ignoring her command, of discarding it away. I watch them dance and hold conversations at the same time. It feels like everyone in here hasn’t washed their hands.

  I pass my beer to the nearest male. “Here.”

  “Hey, man,” he yells above the music. “Did you drink any of this?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t pee in it or anything, right?”

  “What?”

  “Why not? Ha. I’m just yanking on you.” He makes a crass hand gesture, then puts the same hand on my shoulder. I wait for him to swallow half the beer using his anonymous face. “Tell me something. Do we know each other, because I feel like we know each other.” In his other hand is a doobie, which he catches me staring at.

  “Want a suck?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t. Get involved.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Too bad.” He sucks on it once. “Do you know why I do?”

  “No.”

  “It makes things interesting. It makes everything more interesting.”

  I look down at my shoes.

  “Hey, man, you are very sweaty. Are you all right?”

  I’m not doing anything, it seems to me, to provoke this question, but I’ve been making people uncomfortable my whole life without meaning to, so I’m used to it, I’m used to hearing this same question.

  “I’m fine.”

  Over the male’s shoulder, Kyle Glanville walks by. We make eye contact. A thing like disgust shows up on his face, then he turns away. I miss Linus. He’s at the freshman mixer meeting people the normal way, not lurking around parties and urinating on people. Potentially, probably, I could, I realize, feel remorse if something bad happened to Linus or Mary Beth, on account of me.

  The male has finished the beer. Then the previous song ends and “Jesus Is Just Alright” comes on and he says, “God is a woman.” The first person who said this idea to me was my best friend Bird, and years later this party boy with no face is acting like he’s the first to come up with God is a woman.

  Despite the many scraps of conversation going on around my head, I hear at least three separate ones from various sides including “balcony” and “peed” and “pervert” and “cut his throat.” On the dance floor, the sides these are coming from seem to keep changing, giving the feeling of being enclosed by my accusers. As part of math’s consequence at a thousand-person school, where there are only so many parties, the chances of ending up at the same one as my victim are not so low. “Let me get you another,” I say to the male, grabbing his bottle and moving deeper into the crowd.

  At the far end of the apartment, I open the first door I come to and close it behind me.

  Drawing II is Tuesday-Thursday. In the week since I came back from Miles City, Mary Beth’s been sitting next to me and I’ve been walking her to her next class, Renaissance & Its Discontents. Luckily, it’s in Rainbow, which gives us a ten-minute walk from the drawing studio. I always go to my next class, Basic News Writing, and sit in the back, unbending paper clips and thinking about her. She seems to carefully reveal more and more things to me, and whether it’s her intention or not, she becomes a more and more permanent thing, wedges herself gently into my life. She grew up in Thief River Falls, a town in northern Minnesota known for cemetery desecration and bull riding. She’s doing eighteen credits, the maximum allowed, and when I asked her three times if she’d like to do something sometime, she said she’s busy, “But not ‘busy’ like I’m blowing you off. Because I’m not. I’m actually busy.” She’s doing a work-study twenty hours a week at the mediocre art museum next to the student union. She wants to be a gallery director, maybe work for a museum one day. She tells me about how the job always changes, how she can travel and work closely with painters, sculptors, photographers. She likes how she doesn’t know where she’ll end up. I ask if she’s tried showing her stuff to someone somewhere. She gets mumbly and says she’s not good enough, it’s just something she does on the side.

  I look at the walls of her bedroom, which are covered with sketches and prints and tiny paintings, and I see that she wasn’t lying about being busy. There must be sixty or seventy taped up, including a few on the window. One in particular. It’s tiny, a five-by-eight, and it’s of a male, though the lines are so scraggly and rough it almost looks abstract. Maybe fifteen different colors are in it, but the primaries are blue, green, and yellow. The figure, made jagged by the strokes, is sitting in a chair in an empty room, it looks like. Because of the sharp lines he looks both at rest and agitated. Or maybe the best way to say it is the agitation is in the room with him.

  “Stephen, is that you?” She moves in her bed. Her eyes are very dark brown, though she hasn’t opened them.

  “Yeah.”

  She reaches up and pats the front of my shirt. “You’re sweating.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s O.K. Can you put your hand right here?” She takes my hand and places it on the side of her face. I brush her hair behind her ears. She pulls me and I kneel at the side of her bed. Down, down, down. I put my ear against her temple and can hear the hum of her thinking, like a hidden underground power plant by the side of the road.

  “Will you come to my next match?”

  “Yes.”

  When she asked me what I wanted to do after I graduate, I told her I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  MARY BETH STANDS AND PEDALS while I sit on the seat like an oblivious princess. “Wh
at’s the most you ever weighed?” she says. It’s barely snowing.

  “I hit 145 two Marches ago. It was after the season and I got lax with the intake.” A bus blows past the opposite way, south and toward school, wobbling the bike. “Don’t go so fast, I’m gonna fall off.”

  She swerves in an S pattern up Prairie View Road to screw with me, and I have to clamp down my grip. I would get more sensory pleasure from holding her shoulders if she wasn’t going so fast.

  On the way north, by the Pharmart roadside, there’s a homeless man shaking a paper cup. She slows down and I give him the change in my wallet. Bending his scoliosis back even farther, he thanks me four times and compliments me on the prettiness of my girlfriend. After we pedal away, she says nothing, no sign of being impressed.

  Mary Beth is taking us farther from Oregsburg than I’m used to. Farther than the Honky Tonky, north of the Haldon quarry they abandoned because of the granite radiation, all the areas where I run with Linus. The time between cars keeps growing. Yellow weeds that apparently don’t die in winter. The same things over and over. She makes some turns, and houses are fewer and fewer. We go so far that anything man-made becomes noticeable, a rusted gardening can filled to the brim with snow, mailboxes, boards about fruit for sale with painted white arrows. In one of the fields, there’s a horse backbone sticking out of the snow. It thins out to just telephone poles. Wind blows. The snow comes off the roads like old-woman hair, then disappears completely.

  I speak selectively, afraid I’m going to topple the thing Mary Beth is allowing to happen between us, which so far has included mouth affection and body caresses on top of her comforter. We’re still in the phase where you try to make the other person think you don’t have flaws or take dumps. The telephone wires strung up on the roadside keep leading like bread crumbs.

  “What are your parents like?” she says.

  “I’m sure probably a lot like your parents. What are your parents like?”