The Throwback Special (7 page)

THE RULES AND RESTRICTIONS
of the lottery, formulated by Steven at its inception, were simple, clean, and egalitarian: Each man writes his initials on a ball, and places the ball into the approved container. When all balls are mixed in the container, the commissioner draws each of the twenty-two balls, one ball at a time. The man whose ball has been selected then has three minutes to choose any available player from either team.
The following restrictions apply: (1) you may not select a player who has already been selected; (2) you may not select the same player twice in any five-year period; (3) you may select a player from the same team for no more than three consecutive years; (4) you must serve on the Redskins offensive line (which includes tight end Donnie Warren, but does
not
include tight end Clint Didier) at least once every five
years; (5) you must serve in the Giants defensive backfield at least once every seven years; (6) you may not select a player whose physical dimensions are so radically different from yours as to inhibit your performance or to introduce basic issues of credibility (this restriction is enforced by the commissioner); (7) you may not choose Lawrence Taylor more than once in any eight-year period; (8) you must make your selection in a timely way, or it will be made for you by the commissioner; (9) you may not select a “toucher” (Donnalley, Riggins) in consecutive years, or the year after being Theismann; (10) you may not, of course, select Theismann. The man whose initials are on the final ball remaining in the container will be Theismann. None of the rules for selection (above) apply to the player who is selected as Theismann.

The lottery drum had been damaged in its encounter with the keg, and it lay on its side in the hallway outside 324. An IT associate and two graphic designers from Prestige Vista Solutions examined the drum warily, as beachgoers inspect a washed-up animal. The IT associate, Josh, asked the other two if they remembered when Lawrence Taylor snapped Theismann’s leg in the Super Bowl. The graphic designers nodded, though they were too young to remember. Their grisly cultural touchstones were much more recent, and high-def. “I had mono,” Josh said. The two young men nodded. “Well, wait, so I guess it couldn’t have been the Super Bowl. Plus the Giants and Redskins can’t play in the Super Bowl. Never mind. Maybe I was thinking of Tim Krumrie. Remember when Tim Krumrie’s
leg snapped, and kind of flapped around in the air in the Super Bowl?” The two young men nodded.

The keg was stationed just inside the room’s door, on top of several thin gray hotel towels. Some of the men by the keg were reminded of the skirt of a Christmas tree, and this association, far from merry, was for them unhappy. The men by the keg were also outside of the bathroom, and they heard an almost constant cycle of urination, flush, and wash. Carl, filling his cup with beer, said it sounded like a car wash in there.

“Guys?” Trent said.

“Okay, guys?” Trent said.

The room was hot, and very crowded. The pizzas and breadsticks had been delivered, and exchanged for a moist wad of bills that due to an accounting error had included a sixty-eight-dollar tip. The room now smelled of sweet tomato sauce and warm meat. The pizza guy in his rain-slick red windbreaker had asked, upon entering, if this was a bachelor party, and Gary had said that it was, and Steven had said that it wasn’t, and Peter had said something incomprehensible through his mouthguard.

“Lot of men in here,” the pizza guy had said, pocketing the large wad of bills and planting himself on the corner of a bed.

Randy, who had sold his Jeff Bostic equipment at Internet auction and then lied about it, was in the corner, as alone as it was possible to be in a hot room packed with men. Derek stood in another corner, ardently surrounded. Bald Michael was standing on one bed, using two breadsticks
to dramatize a boating accident he had witnessed last summer. All of the men, almost all of the men, licked the sauce from their fingers.

“Should we begin?” Trent said.

“Guys?” Trent said.

“Hey,” Trent said, waving a ping-pong ball above his head. “Guys.”

“Guys, should we begin?” Trent said.

“Let’s go ahead and get started,” Trent said.

“Guys,” he said.

Someone did one of those whistles that requires either two fingers from one hand, or one finger each from two hands. Probably Carl, who had once coached soccer.

“. . . pyramid scheme!” Vince shouted into the silence that ensued after the whistle. The toilet flushed. Bald Michael’s breadstick, being driven by a drunk teen without a boating license, stalled in the water high above the queen bed.

“Anyway,” Gil murmured, “it’s a farmhouse sink. The thing is one hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Anyway,” Tommy said quietly, “the walls are plaster, so there are those strips of wood lathe underneath.”

“Anyway,” Robert whispered, “after that, I shelled out for snow tires.”

“Long story short,” the pizza guy, smoothing the bedspread, said to Andy, Chad, George, and Jeff, “I met my wife about ten years ago through an online dating site called Firestarters. We hit it off, we got married a couple of years later, we had two kids. Things were going fine. I had a good
job as a consultant for a company that installs geothermal systems. Everything was fine.”

George, who was eager to know more about geothermal systems, gave enthusiastic nonverbal listening cues to the pizza guy.

“People sometimes ask me if it was a good marriage,” the pizza guy said. “And I’m like, compared to what? It was fine. We lived in the same house. We grilled on the patio. We selected paint colors. We bought stuff from the neighborhood kids who came to the door. Fine. So then last January we get a letter in the mail. It’s a check for one hundred and seventy dollars, made out to both of us, along with a letter explaining that the check is a payout from a class action suit that we didn’t even know we were a part of. Turns out that the guy who ran Firestarters had gone to jail for fraud. He hadn’t actually matched people together based on their profiles, using what they’d called sophisticated algorithms of affection. There were no algorithms. There wasn’t even a computer. In the Firestarters office? You know what they found? Twenty cases of diet soda and a color printer and a big bulletin board full of headshots. This guy and his staff just matched people together based on their pictures, without any consideration of other information about pet allergies or ideal vacations or religious affiliation, et cetera. And even though his success rate was as good as any of the other top dating sites, he went to jail, and there was a class action suit, and all of the defrauded couples got a check.”

“That’s a sweet deal,” Jeff said.

“When I first found out, I was excited. It was a jolt. Like, okay, you and me, honey, we’re outside of science here. We’re off the grid. This isn’t about being a city mouse or a night owl or a neat freak. It was like a new start. It was like we could start over, almost like we were strangers. The thought that we had not been united by a computer I found exciting, and even kind of sexy. It was exhilarating to think that we may or may not be well suited for each other in terms of temperament or retirement goals. It’s like I suddenly had a mistress, but the mistress was my wife. It really spun my head around. No algorithm! But listen, guys, my wife had completely the opposite reaction. She said she suddenly felt that she did not know me at all, and she said that made her frightened. Wow, I didn’t think anyone actually used that garlic dipping sauce. She said she was scared of me, this big stranger in her home. My big boots, my big parka. And she said that this news just validated certain suspicions that she had had over the years about how truly incompatible we are.”

Trent was saying something. Andy, George, Chad, and Jeff leaned perceptibly toward the pizza guy. None of the men would have necessarily considered the pizza guy
big
.

“She said she had never truly been happy, but she always thought the problem must be with her. She said the science, the computer, had intimidated her. She said she knew it sounded silly, but she believed if she had left me she would have been leaving reason and common sense. And so while I’m excited by all this, she starts flinching around me, and pressing her back against the wall every
time I walk by. She starts sleeping in the guest room, and when I go there to smell her clothes and sheets, I find a kitchen knife under the bed. She was acting crazy, which was attractive to me because one of the things that had always bothered me about her was how completely measured and reasonable she always was. So now she was unreasonable, and I loved it, but when I moved toward her, she got even more scared and unreasonable, which I found almost irresistible. And we fought all the time, which was exciting, but it became clear that she in some way considered me—and not the convicted founder of Firestarters—the fraudulent and deceitful party. The whole marriage just disintegrated in a really exciting way immediately after that crappy little check arrived. In April—early April—she asked me to move out. So I moved out.”

“That is some story,” Andy said. He patted the pizza guy on the shoulder, and made his way toward the keg. Chad chewed on the inside of his lip, considering whether or not to tell the story about the nest of mice in his dishwasher.

“Late June, she calls me one day, out of the blue, completely frantic about a noise in our chimney. Her chimney. It’s loud and it’s low down, directly above the damper. She said it was a loud chittering sound, and she thought it was a squirrel or a raccoon or a bat. She held the phone to the fireplace, but I couldn’t really hear anything. She said she was sorry to bother me, but she didn’t have anyone else to call. So I went over there to the house we used to live in together. I didn’t mind. I was happy to see her. She had a weird new haircut, but she looked nice. After a few minutes
by the fireplace, I heard the noise, a very agitated chirping sound. Really loud. My first thought was squirrel. My wife sat on the love seat behind me with her laptop.”

“Guys?” Trent said.

“She was trying to find audio recordings of different animals stuck in chimneys. She played them. She apologized again for calling me. I said it wasn’t a problem. I put on my big work gloves, and maybe she had that scared look again. She said, Hold on, does it sound like this? She played another recording of an animal stuck in a chimney. All the recordings of stuck animals sounded like the animal stuck in our chimney. Every one. I got a cardboard box from the basement and I put it inside the fireplace. She said to hold on, she wanted to look up a few more things. I squatted down, and I used the poker to open the damper. When the damper opened, I threw down the poker and got ready to close the flaps on the cardboard box when the squirrel fell out. Wait, my wife said. Don’t do that. At first nothing happened, but then all of a sudden—plop plop plop—three baby birds fell into the box, squawking and cheeping. And then I could hear the mother bird up in the chimney, making all kinds of noise. Now of course the mother bird sounded exactly like the recording of birds that my wife had played on her computer. It’s birds, I said. My wife said, I told you to wait. She read to me from her computer. She said they were chimney swifts. She said they’re common in our area. She said they would have flown the nest in another two to three weeks, all of them, mother and young. There had been no need to do
anything. I could have left them alone and they would have been fine, but now what? We both looked down into the box. The baby birds were wet-looking, and covered in black dust. Their eyes weren’t even open. Christ, Henry, she said, they’re federally protected! I took the birds outside in the box, I don’t know why, and then a while later I brought them back in, so at least they could be close to their mother. My wife paced around the room, and then she got back on the love seat with her laptop. She was leaning way over, her hair nearly touching the screen. She said, Please don’t do anything. Just don’t do anything at all. She found something online. Plenty of other people have had baby birds fall out of their chimneys into a box. The thing to do, she said, is place them gently back where they came from. They will try to clutch you with their claws, but they will not hurt you. Try, she said, to reach above the damper and place them on the wall of the chimney. They like to be on a vertical surface. I thought you weren’t supposed to touch baby birds, I said. She said, Just put them back! They’re
federally protected
. I took off my gloves and one by one I picked up the baby birds and placed them back into the chimney, above the damper. They did grip my fingers with their claws, which made it difficult to let them go. But I did it, and then I closed the damper. The mother and the babies made a terrible racket for a while, but then they all got quiet. Everything seemed to be okay. My wife closed her laptop. She stood up from the love seat, and thanked me for coming, though she wouldn’t look at me. My hands were black from the soot in the chimney.” The pizza guy
looked down at his hands. “I told her I thought we made a good team. We saved those birds, I said. She said, We saved those birds from the danger that you created for those birds. Which, she said, feels pretty familiar. Then I left.”

“What happened with your consulting job?” Chad said.

“Long story short,” the pizza guy said, “the next weekend I was down in the basement. I would come in through the bulkhead, sit in the old rocking chair that used to be in the nursery, and just listen to my wife and kids upstairs. I liked to hear them. This night they were playing Yahtzee—my son, my daughter, my wife, and some man named Kent I had heard a few times before. It’s
my
Yahtzee game, by the way. I’ve had it since I was a kid. They were playing in the living room, and every time they shook the dice in that cup, the birds in the chimney went nuts. They clearly were thriving. They chirped like crazy at the dice, and then my family and Kent all laughed and laughed like it was the funniest thing. I could hear my daughter say, They like it! And then Kent said, Or they don’t! Laugh, laugh, laugh. Now who’s the fraud? Now who? And that’s why I went upstairs, and that’s how this whole thing got started.”