The Throwback Special (4 page)

IN THE MEN’S RESTROOM
off the lobby—frequently the subject of online reviews—the countertop and floor were wet, not as if an employee had recently cleaned them but as if firefighters had recently managed a blaze. A light above a corner stall was flickering dimly, reinforcing for Carl the correlation between luminance and civilization. In a brightly lit stall with the door closed, Carl pinched pills from his pocket and swallowed them without water. He reached beneath his damp Jim Burt jersey to touch the strange, tender bump that had recently appeared in his armpit, gently at first and then with painful pressure. The bump was hard, and it would not flatten or disperse with the force of his fingers. It seemed not to contain fluid. Perhaps he could show it to Charles, whom he knew to be a doctor of some kind. Hanging from a hook on the back of the door was the sort of brown canvas shoulder bag used by practitioners of the soft sciences. Carl removed the bag from the hook, and looked inside. He found two books, one called
A Better Mirror
, and the other titled
A Clinical
Guide to Anorexia, 4th Edition
. He dropped the books loudly on the wet floor, along with a thick three-ring binder, a day planner, and a manila envelope labeled “Protocols.” In the front pocket of the leather bag Carl found a DVD with the handwritten title “Marla Sessions.” He put the DVD into his coat pocket. He also took a large, pungent rubber band and a black Sharpie. He removed the top of the Sharpie and turned to face the broad blue partition of the stall. The surface was clean, though its gloss had been scuffed and dulled by solvents and abrasives. There was nothing on the wall to which to respond, no lewd conversational thread he could join with arrow and riposte. He didn’t want to draw a dirty picture. He didn’t want to insult someone’s penis, or testicles. He didn’t want to scribble song lyrics or to extol marijuana. The wall was so blank, so clean. He was committed to writing on it, but he didn’t want to misquote Nietzsche or Camus. He didn’t want to request a sexual act or to offer sexual services or to say anything at all about gays, blacks, Muslims, Jews, or God. He didn’t want to post a threat. He didn’t want to compose or transcribe a limerick about constipation. His shoulder began to ache from holding the pen aloft. The light above the corner stall flickered. The beginning was the most difficult part.

THE MEN CONGREGATED
in the lobby, within the formidable purview of the enormous clock. Many held shoulder
pads and helmets. Many had tied the laces of their cleats together, draped the laces over their shoulders. Gil demonstrated, with his hands, the size of the kitten he had found beneath his gazebo. Chad nodded, far more troubled by Gil’s gazebo than by his kitten. Myron, with that startled look on his face, sought out Charles. Jeff tried to discern what seemed different about Trent, this year’s commissioner. Trent had gained a lot of weight, perhaps thirty pounds, but the change was not remarkable. The men had reached an age when they gained and lost significant things in relatively short periods of time, and it was not unusual for someone to show up in November having acquired or divested weight, God, alcohol, sideburns, blog, pontoon boat, jewelry, stepchildren, potency, fertility, cyst, tattoo, medical devices that clipped to the belt and beeped, or huge radio-controlled model airplanes. The added weight seemed to coincide with Trent’s leadership role, and it contributed to his authority as commissioner.

An aerial view of the lobby would have revealed more or less concentric arcs around the dry fountain, or perhaps around Derek, who was sitting, in flagrant contravention of a handwritten sign, on the fountain’s edge. The general effect was not unlike the standard model of the atom. Randy, sitting glumly on a bench upholstered with a pattern of Eiffel Towers and poodles, was a distant outlier, as was the woman at the front desk, who was conducting Internet research on a bartending school called Highball Academy. (“We should totally do it,” her friend had recently told her.) The men looked frequently at the clock, like
pupils at a teacher. They looked occasionally at the woman, who so powerfully ignored them all. And they looked only rarely at Randy, who merely by sitting there unhappily collected from the beholder a kind of tax or levy in the form of an automatic withdrawal of sentiment. Randy was a figure who demanded the viewer’s sympathy or disdain, and the other men resented having to make that choice, with all of its implications. To look at Randy was to have an aggressive confrontation with oneself, which was not what the men wanted this weekend, or ever. Randy’s socks had lost their elasticity, of course, and they pooled lugubriously around black shoes whose heels had been wrecked by pronation. His herniated duffel bag lay at his feet. He had been unable to zip it completely, and in the unzipped bulge the men could have seen, had they been looking toward Randy, a small piece of the new and astonishingly white Jeff Bostic jersey. What most of the men had learned by now was that Randy’s Bostic gear from the previous year had been stolen, according to Randy, from a self-storage unit outside of Wilmington, Delaware, and that Trent, using the discretion of the commissioner, had spent the dues money to replace the equipment rather than to rent out the conference room, which had been reserved by a baleful organization called Prestige Vista Solutions. What many of the men would suspect—and they would be correct—was that Randy, having lost his eyewear business, had sold the equipment in an online auction.

Jeff’s check-in attempt had been rebuffed, and the other men thought it wise not to risk further attempts.
The woman at the front desk skimmed the FAQs at the Highball Academy site, and strands of her hair fell over her face like an
Out of Office
sign. She did not want to talk to the men about check-in. She disliked the notion that check-in time was flexible or negotiable, and she was strongly opposed to the men’s duffel bags. She did not consider herself picky about men, but a duffel bag—she was sorry, that was just a deal-breaker. Her job, perhaps, had made her overly sensitive to luggage. She needed a man with a suitcase. No pleated pants, no exotic pets, no duffel bags—certainly there remained a sizable pool.

Wesley occupied the third arc with Bald Michael, Steven, and Nate. A very large canvas sack sat like a heeling dog beside Steven. The sack contained the lottery drum, enormous even when disassembled, that the men would use later that night to select players. Wesley had hoped to get a nap before the lottery. He had been having trouble sleeping for the past several months, and he typically felt exhausted in the afternoon. His entire life he had never had trouble sleeping, but all of a sudden he just couldn’t do it. The insomnia made Wesley feel, biologically, like a failure. The family’s pet cat slept twenty hours a day, and made it look easy. And now, granted many extra waking hours each night, Wesley had time to consider, for the first time, his other failures and shortcomings. Bald Michael was talking, Wesley realized, about his son, who just last week, Bald Michael said, began cruising.

“What?” Wesley said.

Bald Michael said that the kid already had a shiner and
a big scratch on his nose. “He’s banging into everything,” he said.

Wesley tried to conduct a quick audit of his discomfort. Steven and Nate did not seem troubled. Why did Steven and Nate not seem troubled? Why was Nate doing that strange crouched shuffling? One time, at a party, Wesley had overheard someone on a crowded patio explaining the customs of Fire Island, and it had made his toes curl. Then Steven did a pigeon-toed walk, and fell over. Why did Steven do that?

“No, like this,” Bald Michael said, gripping the back of a chair and doing his own version of the walk of someone who was significantly injured or perhaps disabled. Nate and Steven laughed, so Wesley tried to laugh, too. Was Bald Michael making fun of the apparently serious erotic injuries sustained by his homosexual son?

“Hell, but what can I do?” Bald Michael said. “It’s just a natural step. He has to go through it.”

“And at least he’s got a lot of padding,” Steven said, slapping his backside.

Wesley studied them. He realized that if this was what it meant to be accepting, then he was not accepting. Bald Michael pulled a photograph from his wallet, and passed it to the men.

“Cute little guy,” Nate said, passing the photo to Steven, who grunted his appreciation, and passed it to Wesley. The photo showed a toddler with a sweater vest and a chin rash. Wesley stared at the photo, and felt the sting of tears. He was so very tired.

“Wesley,” Bald Michael said, “don’t you have a boy, too?”

Wesley’s boy was nineteen years old, and three inches taller than Wesley. He was a remarkable kid. He had not had a girlfriend since the eighth grade. Wesley felt that he and his son had not been close in many years.

“He’s in college,” Wesley said, though that fact sounded preposterous to him. “He’s a pre-dentistry major, but he likes philosophy. He plays Ultimate Frisbee, which apparently is a serious sport. And he’s probably gay. I think he probably is, though he hasn’t said anything to me or to Barbara.”

The third arc grew quiet. Bald Michael and Nate made sounds and faces that were intended to be supportive of Wesley’s son’s sexuality.

“It just seems like more and more people are,” Nate offered. Bald Michael nodded. Steven’s face did not look supportive at all, but in fact Steven had stopped listening. He had overheard a conversation about Redskins receiver Gary Clark in the fourth arc, on the far outskirts of the fountain.

“Excuse me, guys,” Steven said, jumping like an electron to an outer shell. The men in the third arc assumed the worst about Steven. He was from Arkansas. Some people weren’t quite ready for change.

“He wasn’t a Smurf,” Steven said to the men in the fourth arc—Trent, Peter, and Jeff.

“Who?” Jeff said.

“
Cahk
,” Peter said. “
Guhh Cahk
.”

“I clearly heard someone say that Gary Clark was a Smurf,” Steven said. “And he wasn’t.”

“He had to be,” Trent said. “He was tiny.”

“
Fumbudge
den
,” Peter said.

“He was small, but he wasn’t one of the Smurfs,” Steven said. “The Smurfs were Virgil Seay, Alvin Garrett, and Charlie Brown. And that was before Clark was drafted out of James Madison.”

“
Cahk uz pot uv fumbudge
,” Peter said.

“Take out your mouthguard,” Jeff said.

Peter removed his mouthguard, which remained umbilically connected to his mouth by a thin strand of saliva. “Clark was part of the Fun Bunch,” he said.

“Wrong again,” Steven said with gleeful exasperation. “The Fun Bunch dissolved after the ’84 season. The league made the rule about excessive celebration, and that all but wiped out the Fun Bunch. Excessive celebration, you may recall, was pretty much the Fun Bunch’s reason for being.”

“I think the key term here is
orchestrated
,” Trent said.

“Ready?” Jeff said. He bent his knees and swung his arms, counting to three. It appeared that he wanted to reenact the Fun Bunch’s group high-five, but the other men ignored him, and Jeff did not leave the carpet.

“Wait,” said Gil, who had leaped two levels to join the conversation. “Did the Smurfs and the Fun Bunch exist at the same time?”

“The Smurfs were basically a subset of the Fun Bunch,” Steven said, drawing circles in the air. “Contained within the superset of the Fun Bunch was the Smurfs, who were
the Fun Bunch’s smallest receivers. Think of it like this: all Smurfs belonged to the Bunch, but not every member of the Bunch was a Smurf.”

“Was that thunder?” Jeff said, looking toward the parking lot.

“Gary Clark was part of the
Posse
,” said Myron, materializing out of some unknown arc with a startled look on his face.

“Correct,” Steven said. “
But not in ’85
. Clark, Art Monk, and Ricky Sanders were the members of the Posse, but Sanders wasn’t a Redskin until ’86. There was no Posse in ’85. It didn’t exist. Guys, I explain this every year.”

“So what group did Clark belong to in ’85?” Trent said.

Jeff stared at the woman at the front desk.

“Nothing,” Steven said. “No group. That’s what you have to keep in mind.”

IN THE MEN’S RESTROOM
off the lobby there were six urinals across from three stalls. Vince entered the restroom, regarded the six unoccupied urinals, and selected, for reasons ultimately too complex to comprehend, the second urinal from the left. He placed his free hand high above his head, palm against the tile, in the manner of one being frisked for weapons. Though alone, he suppressed a sigh. Fat Michael then entered the restroom, and he chose a urinal, the fifth, at a suitable but not gratuitous distance
from Vince’s. He made this calculation instantaneously, without conscious thought, while whistling “The Coventry Carol.” This spatial arrangement was conventional and propitious, provided a third man did not enter. Gary entered, and he discerned the dreaded 2-5 split, by which means two men in essence had occupied an entire wall of urinals. With reluctance he chose the third urinal, to the right of Vince, and immediately began talking.

“My wife would like me to piss sitting down,” he said.

Fat Michael nodded, staring at a piece of blue gum in his urinal that resembled a brain. His wife, too, had asked him to sit down. It was not an unreasonable request. The validity of the request, in fact, was what had made Fat Michael so angrily opposed. Danish men sit down, she had told him, which only made him more recalcitrant.

“She doesn’t like the mess I make,” Gary said. “She says men in other countries sit down.”

“Do they?” Fat Michael said.

“I don’t know,” Gary said.

On several occasions through the years, when afternoon sun was illuminating the bathroom in a soft and golden light, Vince had seen his urine splattering out of the toilet while he stood. Honestly, it was like a fireworks show. There was no denying it. His wife, too, had asked him to sit. She had read something about Sweden. When he finished at the urinal, Vince turned and saw, on the glistening floor of the middle stall, a brown canvas bag and two books.