Stephen Florida

by Habash, Gabe

  Hargraves, when he sees me, walks over and kneels like a father and quietly says, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s O.K.”

  Vindication after wrongful accusation is a satisfaction so instantaneous and profound it borders on the spiritual, and when they finally let me practice, something strange happens: I don’t get tired. I do the drills I’ve done a thousand times before. I’m let loose to legally do all of it in the light of day. Enacting a pattern with your hands, something you know how to do right and well is a source of deep pleasure. I feel weaker and out of rhythm from being out so long, but the hours of biking and running make it impossible for me to be tired. I push ahead of everyone except Kryger, who then, too, falls behind. The degree of my exertion makes a big blue vein in my wrist stick out. It doesn’t do anything. It just shows itself.

  I’ve been on the bike for the better part of a month, sitting there and watching. I’ve seen Kryger’s new tricks, I used all this time for scouting how he goes low single leg now and goes right away.

  They all form a circle, gather around the mat in their soaking shirts, some of them with their arms crossed and their faces the tired faces you always see on wrestlers. Maybe because they have their whole lives ahead of them, I get the impression that they all could take or leave what happens between me and Kryger.

  “Same as always,” Hargraves says. “One match, that’s it.”

  He blows the whistle.

  No surprise, with Kryger there’s no surprise. He doesn’t even bother to engage high but instead immediately goes low, right for my infamous knee, but it’s like I’ve seen it all coming, a shadow of clouds on the sea, I’ve seen his whole vindictive personality. I’ve known him for four years. He comes at me and I use him against himself by ducking him, my left arm grabs across and tugs on his right triceps. I am this way because I hate losing and winning is everything. I lock him up in a cradle, turn him, and pin him. I scream in his face, “Everything you heard about me is true!” They pull him away from me. “I thank God, every single day, that I don’t have to rely on any of you! If you’re waiting for someone to beat me, you’re not going to get it. Have a nice evening!”

  I walk out of the gym. Head straight for the shower. They’re all coming in as I wrap up cleaning myself. On my way out, Kryger’s going in and he grips the sides of my head like a clay water jug and my towel falls off and so does his but three or four of them tackle him and he slips on the tile and when his head smacks the drain, it makes a deep noise.

  I dress in a hurry. Around the corner Kryger is yelling. When I’m jamming my feet into my shoes, I make the mistake of looking up and find that Linus is staring right at me. On the chalkboard next to him, someone wrote I am what I am. —Jesus. The book is folded open near the end in Linus’s lap. Everyone seems to give him space, a parallel phenomenon occurred when I was pushed further and further from the team because of my knee. During practice, his face was flat, he was quiet the whole time, including when he threw up in the trash can, he didn’t say one thing.

  He says, “Do you know when you’re thinking hard, you put your fingers on your front teeth and hold them? Like this?”

  I shove my possessions into my backpack. As I’m trying to quickly get out of there, he says, “Is this about having the last laugh? Is that it? Because you know, the person who thinks they’re getting the last laugh is never the one who gets it, is what happens.”

  Through my time in the library, I’ve gotten a handle on some poetry basics, and on Friday night back in my room, I decide to use some of my work for good. I tear out a sheet from my notes where I copied down a poem because I liked it so much. I walk it down the hall and slide it under his door. I cannot help it if my sentimentality, even if I’m not good at acting on it, prevents me from giving up those I care about, especially those like Linus, who’s pulling up the carpets of our friendship. Then I walk back to my room, lock the door, and at last, sleep comes to Stephen Florida, like a parcel of good news.

  First thing Saturday morning, I make an appointment at the career center. The earliest they can get me in isn’t until February 16, the day after the mental doctor’s appointment.

  As they’re filing in for practice, I make sure to stand next to Linus so we’re paired up for warm-ups. He knows what I’m doing but doesn’t move away. When we start, I put my hands on him, stretch his arms for him, I’m close, hear his nose breathing near my ear, and it’s there again, my attachment, like I knew it would be, it never really goes away because I have a weakness for him, my hands on his shoulders, he’s been mine for a year, what’s more is more, and when I take my palm away from his collar, it’s covered in his sweat.

  With Fink gone, small cracks of disarray begin. Hargraves brings his new adopted shelter schnauzer to practice. The whole time it barks and pisses in the corners, and then while Hargraves is making a speech, it walks over to Lee and begins fervently humping his leg, looking up into his eyes, as if asking him a question.

  Hargraves stops practice right in the middle and demands a plank competition. The whole team is spread out over the mats, and Hargraves walks between the rows and occasionally kicks his foot underneath someone to see if there’s enough space. One by one, they drop out. After seven minutes, it’s just Linus, Kryger, Ucher, and Stephen Florida. Ucher drops out at eight minutes. Kryger drops out. Hargraves yells at me, “Florida, why you smiling? You just happy to be in my company? I wanna know because I wanna smile like you.” Will is primary, instinct is secondary, intellect is after that. Talent is somewhere below that. My sabbatical has made me rusty but day after day of eating the dirt has pushed my will further, and that is more than a sum gain, far more. Linus quits at eleven minutes.

  After the dog has tripped us during sprints, Hargraves blows his whistle. “Goddamnit, all of you make me sick! I want someone to show me something. I want two of you space monkeys right here, in this circle.” On the opposite side of the crowd from me is Linus. He’s looking at me. “Right now!” Hargraves says. And what is in the look is a challenge, it’s without a doubt an invitation to get in there with him so we can see who’s better. I start to step forward.

  “I’ll do it,” says Kryger, and then, right after, Ucher says, “I’ll go.” Hargraves looks disappointed, you could see his disappointment from space, but he puts his whistle in his mouth, and we all stand there and watch some mediocre wrestling.

  “Now buddy carries,” Hargraves says.

  Kryger, who is my weight, jumps on my back. I carry him up the bleacher steps. I’m expecting him to pinch my ears or utter a streak of curses, but he’s entirely silent, as if I’m carrying an animal. I’ve been around Kryger for a while now, and though he’ll never beat me, he’ll never work as hard as I do or want it as bad, I don’t not respect him. I don’t dwell and he’s never been much to me, but he’s probably the third-best wrestler on the team and I probably have him to thank a little for pushing me. But I’m not sorry I extinguished his career, I’m not sorry about anything.

  Ahead of me, Linus carries Slim John Carpenter. I can smell him. Whenever the two of us walked on campus and passed school security, every single time and for no reason, Linus would lean over and mutter, “Be cool, just fucking be cool, all right?” and would look at his fingernails and do that thing where you buff them on your shirt. Linus climbs the bleachers quickly and lets out a quivering fart.

  After practice, in the locker room, Hargraves delivers a second speech, which is on hardship and is somewhat a continuation of the first speech, and which ends with a description of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

  After Hargraves leaves, dragging the dog out by the leash, Slim John Carpenter waits a few seconds and then says to everyone, “Is it just me, or is Coach’s personal life a dumpster fire?”

  But then Farrow, who maybe we forgot was still in the room, says, “Hey, cool it.”

  A few of them, Whitey and Young William and Jerry, realize Elder William is taking a really long time in the shower and ransack his locker and hi
de all his clothes. When Elder William walks out dripping in a towel, he stops in front of his empty locker and says, “Now, what the fuck is this?” Then Jerry runs by behind him and smacks a palmful of newly shaven hair bits onto Elder William’s wet shoulder, where they stick. “Elder, you got your merkin all wrong!” Whitey says, but Elder William tiredly sits down, his tiredness comes from a deep, old place. “I’m going to beat the bottoms of your feet,” he says. And Whitey says, “What’s that? You don’t get dressed, you’re gonna be late for parliament, you old fag!”

  As I’m putting my shoes in my bag, Linus says, “Did you write that poetry?” He’s standing at my locker with his coat on.

  “No, it wasn’t me.”

  “It was good, I thought.”

  “Robert Frost is who wrote it.”

  “Well, are you trying to seduce me with his poetry? If you’re trying to show me you’ve changed, you’re doing a good job, I’m ready to take my underwear off for you, I’m ready to marry you, if only you’d ask.”

  “If only.”

  A few months ago, around Halloween, he asked, “What percentage of the world do you think limps?” Students were already walking around in their costumes and we were running to the goiter tree.

  “Fifteen percent.”

  “I was exactly going to say fifteen percent.”

  It had never occurred to me that someone could be selfish about certain things and not about others.

  A few hours later, another lesson happens when I open my door and find the muddy gorilla mask slid inside, the one I wore to the Carver farm, the one the goat kicked off, with a paper note jammed in it that says Do you think I forgot. The lesson is that this is a part of my life now, that it won’t ever really go away, that it just drifts into the background temporarily. I incorporate the fright into my life, just like everything else. I leave the mask on the floor because it’s another symbol and as much a part of my life as the crutches under my bed and the green notebook hidden in my desk, I can’t get rid of them. I just lock the door and don’t sleep, though how much of it is because of Garnes and how much is because of the mask on the carpet is unclear.

  On Sunday morning, while I’m washing my hands in the bathroom, I notice my fingernail’s fallen off.

  When you try to talk to God you don’t get him, instead you just get a sniveling little assistant who says he’ll relay your question and who goes around the corner for thirty seconds and reports back what he says God whispered in his ear, but you know that’s not what he’s done, there’s no one around the corner, he just stood there and counted off a reasonable time. As you know, that’s what religion is.

  In the afternoon, when I’m folding my underwear in the laundry room, I spot the crossword book facedown by the trash can. Flipping through it, in a variety of red and blue and black inks, all five hundred puzzles, which get steadily more difficult, are completed. The last puzzle, which looks like it has a coffee stain on it, has the clue “Thoreau’s Germanic ideal.” In the puzzle, the person filled in Waldeinsamkeit.

  After it gets dark, I take my flashlight and stagger out onto Egg Lake. I’m a coward again because I have something to lose. That’s my policy. I’m a coward again and I’m practical. I locate the hole the pistol went down, which luckily someone’s been reusing. I take the mask out of my sweatshirt pocket and shove it in. It doesn’t want to sink at first, and I have a panic moment watching it float, but then when it finally does, I immediately think of Mary Beth, and the feeling is maybe astonishment, or between that and the nameless feeling that inspires you to crawl along the floor, grasping for the unutterable. I think what no one else can: that Mary Beth is the one thing beyond wrestling that hasn’t toppled over, that I keep going back to her in my mind and it never once disappoints or reflects false light, that I lose my grip on everything else, but not her.

  A few hours before the Jan Gehring match, I walk to the gym and search the training room until I find the athletic directory. I call the phone number for Roland Fink, and Mrs. Fink answers.

  “Hello?” The baby is crying in the background. “Sorry, can you call right back?”

  The line goes dead. I listen to the dial tone, find out what comes after the dial tone. I keep getting my ethics policy and moral policy mixed up. I dial the numbers again.

  “Hello. Sorry about that. How can I help you?”

  “Is this Mrs. Fink I’m speaking to?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Fink, I’m with the Oregsburg College Administrations Department. I was just calling to confirm you and your husband’s address? Can you confirm it?”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “Nothing at all, ma’am! Just keeping the records current. Can you confirm your address?”

  “Seventy-seven Maytime Drive.”

  “Thank you, and this would be the Aiken zip code?”

  “Correct.” The baby suddenly starts crying again.

  “Thank you, that’s the address we have on file. Have a great day, Mrs. Fink.”

  “You, too. Good-bye.”

  I put the green notebook in an envelope with a bunch of stamps and mail it.

  Pretty soon they start coming in. I can hear the Garnes people outside the locker room. They have a chant about falcons that’s probably meant to stir up intimidation. The big hullabaloo in here is that Hargraves wants Ucher at 149 because Elder William is home with a tension headache. So he drags Ucher around like a rag doll from the stationary bike to the showers and back again, weighing him between to gauge the progress. Ucher has less than thirty minutes to cut 2.6 pounds. Seeing that they’re not going to make it, they bring the bike into the shower room. Hargraves takes off his clothes down to his briefs and goes in there with him. He has Whiting put up a plywood board and block in the shower entrance, and then he turns all the showers on full heat. On the other side of the board, through the whishing water sounds you can hear Hargraves screaming at Ucher. “You made a deal, son. You made a deal. What can I do to get through to you, son?”

  I put my singlet on. Jesus Christ. I welcome the nausea and finger the curled Friedrich card before placing it back in my shoe. When they all file out to the gym, I go into the bathroom and slam the stall door behind me and slap my face until I’m satisfied. I head out with no warm-ups on. As soon as I enter the gym, I feel all the eyes in the stands on my knee, the special type of judgment-based attention, a feeling of being watched that I haven’t felt to this degree since high school, when I got over the exhibition of my bulge to the spectators, when I finally stopped thinking about my body.

  I have an early draw. Linus gets the one before me. I pace around the fringe of the mats. Anyone who tells you wrestling is a team sport is telling you a lie. Anyone who tells you you tried your best after you lose is telling you a lie.

  Linus and the kid he’s facing line up for the match. Just before it starts, Linus does something strange. Jumping up and down, standing on the edge of the circle, he raises his hand and puts his middle finger and pointer to his temple and flicks his thumb, as if firing a trigger. Sweat pours down his face like water, dangling from his eyelashes, and he is looking right at me. Then the match starts and he pins the Garnes 125 in under two minutes. Watching what he does to him is like watching a ritual sacrifice. It’s so quiet it’s uncomfortable. At the end, after the pin is called but before he lets go, he says something distasteful into the kid’s ear and the kid tries to take a swing at him, but Linus is already walking off the mat, and when he passes by he smacks my butt.

  When I walk onto the mat, I tug my straps and set my headgear, bend my head back. Though she does not want to be seen, though she’s sitting in the back corner of the gym’s bleachers with a Twins hat and sunglasses on, I recognize Mrs. Fink, and I feel a flickering strangeness in my body, something similar to what the voice of Aunt Lorraine or Topaz caused.

  I’m ready to face Gehring because I’ve been under the assumption that I would face him the whole time. I stare at his face across the mat. I
find plenty of flaws in Jan Gehring, know exactly what to do. I don’t need to rehearse. I’m ready to go.

  They give me Jan Gehring and this is what they get. You give me a fragile toy and I’m going to break that bitch.

  The moment I put my hands on him, it all comes back. My injury leaves like the red curse. It’s like how you forget what the zoo smell is, that all zoos smell the same, but then you walk past the ape enclosure. As the scouting report said, he tries to hand fight, but I slap him away and shoot low four seconds in and hook and drop to the outside of his left leg and as he’s falling forward, I step over to his right leg from behind and drive, and we fight for who knows how long, him trying to push me off like I have raging lupus and he’s disgusted. I’ve had to get used to the sourness of losing but goddamnit I’ll never get tired of winning. He gets his right leg out, and I make note to attack his left from now on, and he wiggles out and his knee catches my chin and closes my mouth like a cupboard, but we’re not going to be patient because that’s what he wants, so I duck under his graspings, going again for his left leg, getting his right, too, despite him wishing I wouldn’t, he’s right back where he was before, and this time he’s pushing at the cups of my headgear with more desperation and worrying, which is good, and I climb up his body like a beetle, I pin his sides like I’m packing him up for the coffin, I pressure his head and force it to the mat, and beyond him the referee squats to watch the angles, I push his far shoulder like I’m crowbarring open Tut’s tomb or I’m Lazarus moving aside the rock for the big reunion, but it still won’t touch the mat, then Gehring makes a sound like something’s about to happen he doesn’t want to, and so I push until his shoulder sinks, brushes the mat, and then the ref calls it. The display clock has the pin at 2:46.