The Throwback Special Read online

  “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.

  “I tried sitting once,” Gary said. “I did. I was trying to be considerate. Because one time, when the sun was slanting into the bathroom at the perfect angle, I could see the piss just shooting out of the bowl. Have you ever seen those salmon when they return to their spawning grounds?”

  Of course, of course the other men had seen the salmon.

  “It does make a mess,” Gary said. “But the one time I tried sitting, the only time, my dog came into the bathroom. He’s this old, handsome black Lab with a grizzled snout. You know what I mean?”

  Fat Michael and Vince nodded, solemnly affirming the way that old handsome Labs become grizzled in their snouts.

  “He just looked at me,” Gary said. “And I honestly think he was judging me. I was down at his level, sitting on the toilet, and I just think he totally lost respect for me. I could see it.”

  “I don’t think your dog was judging you,” Fat Michael said. He turned from the urinal, eliciting the ferocious automatic flush. On his way to the sink he noticed, beneath the door of the stall, the brown canvas bag and the books.

  “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” Gary said.

  “You really should,” Vince said, though he did not.

  “What do you think, Charles?” Fat Michael said at the sink, scrubbing his hands like a surgeon.

  “Hey, Charles,” Vince said, knocking on the door of the stall.

  “Doesn’t he work with young girls?” Gary said.

  “Settle this one, Charles,” Fat Michael said. “Was Gary’s dog judging him?”

  “Charles, do Danish men sit?” Vince said. He knocked again, harder, pushing the door open and revealing an empty stall and a comprehensively vandalized partition. Vince entered the stall, followed by Gary and Fat Michael.

  “Holy crap,” Gary said, facing the wall.

  “Wow,” Vince said.

  This happened a long time ago. In high school i used to go out drinking with my friends and then late at night i would sneak over to this girl’s house to have sex. She wasn’t even my girlfriend. I would throw gravel at her window to wake her up then she would come downstairs to let me in. She would close the door and then lie down on the rug in the foyer. She was so tired. Why would she let me in? Do not write slut. Imagine being woken up for sex by a drunk boy who doesn’t love you. What i’m trying to one night i was throwing rocks at the window and then another window opened in the back of the house and her father stuck his face out and said oh for god’s sake just come in! I went back home instead. The night was ruined. Do not write faggot. I told myself i would never go back there again but i went back several more times. Do not write hell yes. Do not draw a vulva. Someone should have put me in a kennel. All of us. Her name was stacy demps and i’m sorry. Do not write pussy.

  Gary laughed, patting his front pockets, his back pockets.

  IN THE LOBBY, the model of the atom had collapsed into a tight cluster of men that moved gradually, and without the volition of its constituents, toward the front desk. Tommy’s mustache made Robert uncomfortable—it was a statement in a language that he did not understand—and so Robert broke from the cluster, and retreated to the locked door of the conference room. There was, he recalled, the year that Chad tried to break-dance atop the long, gleaming table. Once again Robert checked the foam board schedule on the easel beside the door. The room was still booked for the entire weekend. The repaired chinstrap dangled from his long flannel cuff like a chrysalis. He did not like change, which he experienced nearly always as loss. He felt forlorn about the conference room, and exasperated at Randy, and bitterly envious of Prestige Vista Solutions.

  Jerry, the director of transportation for Prestige Vista Solutions, checked the schedule on the easel beside the door, but he saw only a scribbled sketch of a fish. He asked Robert if Robert was one of the football players that he had seen in the lobby. Yes, Robert said quietly. He did not want to talk, or to explain, particularly to this man with a laminated name tag. The name the Redskins had given the flea flicker play was the Throwback Special, and thus some of the men, never Robert, referred to the group as “specialists.” Neither did Robert care for the term reenactor, which made him think of the freaks with hardtack and muskets, running through the woods and endeavoring to keep their powder dry. There was not a good way to talk about what he was doing here.

  “It’s an annual thing,” Robert offered. Jerry stood beside him, facing the locked conference room. From the lobby behind them came the waves of masculine sound, the toneless song of regret and exclamation. Then, like a child handling an item he has been forbidden to touch, Robert said, “But this is the last year.” He rubbed the inside of the chinstrap with his thumb, stared at the honeycomb carpet in the conference room. “Last year,” he repeated, rubbing the strap. There, he had said it, though he did not know why. He had no idea if his claim was true. Its truthfulness was somehow beside the point, as he had not intended to disclose or predict. He had intended something else, some reckless spell or counterspell, he did not know. Robert suddenly felt dangerous to himself, and he glanced at Jerry to gauge the potency of his remark. It was something of a relief and a disappointment to observe that Jerry seemed undisturbed.

  Jerry had seen the jerseys and helmets in the lobby, but had no idea what the men were here to do. He asked Robert if Robert remembered when Lawrence Taylor broke Joe Theismann’s leg on Monday Night Football. Robert said yes, he remembered. Compound fracture, Jerry said, wincing. A comminuted fracture, as well, Robert said. His voice was too high, and honestly, why was he talking at all? A comminuted fracture is when the bone breaks into several pieces, Robert explained. The men stood side by side, staring thro
ugh the small window of the door of the conference room. Now Robert worried that Jerry was going to tell a story about the night it happened. Strangers who saw the helmets and uniforms always wanted to tell a story about how a friend’s mom fainted and the bowl of popcorn just went everywhere and you could see up her skirt. Or about the friend, now serving time, who laughed when Theismann’s leg broke in two. Or about how they were doing geometry homework, and the sound was down so they didn’t hear Frank Gifford say, “Theismann’s in a lot of trouble,” and they didn’t hear Gifford say, “We’ll look at it with the reverse angle, one more time, and I suggest, if your stomach is weak, you just don’t watch,” and they didn’t hear Monday Night Football color commentator O. J. Simpson groaning at the violence, and they happened to look up and see the reverse angle, and they either threw up or they very nearly threw up. Jerry told Robert he would always remember Lawrence Taylor’s reaction. Yes, of course, Robert said, hoping to curtail Jerry’s memories. After having snapped Theismann’s fibula and tibia, Taylor frantically waved for the medical personnel on the Redskins sideline to come onto the field. And then he stood with his hands on his helmet. Did Robert remember? Robert did. And there was something about that gesture, that very human gesture, an archetypal sign of despair or disbelief, holding one’s own head. For comfort, or perhaps for protection or containment. Except that Taylor still had his helmet on, Jerry said, staring through the small window of the door of the conference room. He would never forget it, Jerry said. So his hands, Taylor’s hands, rested not on his forehead or scalp, but on his helmet. The circuit of anguish could not be completed. The very equipment of his profession was an impediment to his humanity, to the proper expression of shock. Jerry from Prestige Vista Solutions did not say circuit of his anguish, but it’s precisely what he meant. Robert understood. He nodded. He did not want Jerry to have the conference room this weekend, and he didn’t particularly want to be standing here talking to Jerry about Theismann, but nevertheless, everything Jerry had said was correct.

  TRENT HAD COME HOME to find his daughter going down on a boy. Jeff had come home to find his daughter going down on a girl. Andy had come home to find his kid doing like this with an aerosol can of whipped cream.

  “Yeah, whippets,” said George, the public librarian.

  Tommy had come home to find that his dog had eaten a package of diapers. The surgery was twenty-five hundred dollars, and now he had pet insurance. Nate had come home to find his wife Skyping with a man in a military uniform. Bald Michael had come home to find his son hurting a cat. Whenever Peter comes home now, his daughter is reading. He was so anxious for her to learn to read, so worried when she showed little interest, but now that’s all she does. She doesn’t even talk to Peter anymore. She just sits in corners, knobby knees pulled up to her chin, the book held over her face like this, like a veil. The other men knew about books over the faces of girls. Carl came home to find his son building something with a lot of wires. Wesley came home to find that his twins had built twin snowmen. The picture was on his phone if he could only find it. Fat Michael had a friend who came home to find that the rags he had used to apply linseed oil to his furniture had spontaneously combusted, causing sixty thousand dollars of property damage. When Steven had come home, everyone in the house was just gone.

  “My mother is living with us now,” Gil said. “One day I came home and I didn’t see her anywhere. I checked the backyard, but she wasn’t there. I came back in, looked in the guest room, in the den, in the basement. She wasn’t there. I was calling out for her, but there was no answer. Then upstairs I find her in the bathroom. We have those sliding glass shower doors. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “They slide like this?” Steven asked.

  “No, like this,” Gil said, though Steven looked skeptical. “And the doors had broken. They had just shattered. Later I looked online. Apparently, this happens. They sometimes just explode into thousands of pieces of glass. On their own. It was nothing my mother did.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” Andy said.

  “The glass was inches thick in the shower and all through the bathroom. It seriously looked like a beach in there. My mother was in the shower when the glass broke, and she couldn’t move. She couldn’t go anywhere. She would have sliced her feet up. So she just stood there wrapped in her towel, trapped in the shower for I don’t know how many hours. She wouldn’t really say.”

  Charles, who typically did not care for Gil’s unseemly stories about his mother, began to look around the lobby for his brown canvas bag.

  “Her voice was hoarse,” Gil said, “presumably from calling out to nobody. She looked like she was shivering, but she said it was just her palsy. You know what she said? She said it really wasn’t that bad because it gave her some time to think. That’s what she said. Time to think. I tried to clear a path through the glass. I swept the shards into a dustpan. I filled a garbage bag with glass. I cut my hands and knees. I was bleeding and sweating into the glittering pieces of glass. I said, ‘Mom, goddamn it, just say it was a bad day!’ I said, ‘Mom, this is bad! Just say it!’”

  The woman at the front desk held a wince against the drone and pulse, the loud achievement of assembly. Soon the men would disperse, leaving behind in the lobby their scent and those curvilinear bits of dried mud that had fallen from their silly football shoes. She said it looked like the rooms were now ready. “Five total, is that correct?”

  “Six,” Andy said.

  “Oh, yes, six,” she said, squinting at her computer screen. “And have you gentlemen stayed with us before?” she asked.

  Andy stared at the mole on the woman’s cheek. He knew there was another one on her abdomen, just below her right breast. He felt incorporeal.

  “Yes,” he said. “Every year for the past sixteen years.”

  - 2 -

  THE LOTTERY

  “‘HAIR ON A MAMMOTH IS NOT PROGRESSIVE IN any cosmic sense,’” George said to Rick, a copyright lawyer for Prestige Vista Solutions.

  “Okay,” Rick said, looking at his shoes.

  “That’s Stephen Jay Gould.”

  “Is it?” Rick said.

  “What he means,” George said, stepping into the elevator with Rick, “is that there is no inherent or objective value—good or bad—to the woolly mammoth’s thick hair. The hair becomes valuable, or not, only within a specific context or environment. Only in an ice age would hair be favorable. Only in warmer temperatures would it be deleterious. The woolly mammoth is not, cosmically, a fit creature, and neither is its hairless counterpart. Fitness, always, means fitness within particular environmental conditions. It’s not as if you could look at both and predict which one would survive.”

  Rick pushed his floor button, then pushed the door close button several times. He shifted his weight back and forth from left foot to right.

  “Gould provides an interesting analogy,” George said slowly. “So you said, what, that the flea flicker was a horrible call. Well, yes and no. I would argue that you need to consider a play in its context, its environment. And the environment of a play is, to a large extent, the opposing team’s play. A play can take its form—and value and fitness—only within the medium, the crucible, of the adversary’s play. What we call a play in football is actually the reaction that occurs between two plays, which up to the point of the snap are just competing abstractions, just fantasies of domination. To call a play is simply to transmit information.”

  George was pacing the car. Rick stared at the illuminated and unchanging numbers above the doors. The elevator stopped, and its doors opened to an empty hallway. Rick resolved to write an online review of these elevators.

  “The plays that are called from the sidelines are speculative, abstract. The line of scrimmage is the narrow barrier between those abstractions. When the ball is snapped, the barrier dissolves and the two plays begin to act upon each other. We have confluence! From two plays the play comes into being. Each team’s playbook fantasy takes on terres
trial form. The play lives a fleeting life, like certain unstable isotopes. Each play attempts to assert dominance over the other play, by force and deception. This is why football is the most scientific of sports. A game is a series of discrete experiments. Hypothesis, observation, results, analysis, conclusion.”

  The number 5 button was illuminated, but Rick jabbed it eight or nine times. Rick’s simple point in the lobby, which he now regretted making, was that if your quarterback’s bone comes out of his leg during a play, then it was a bad play.

  “The Throwback Special was not a priori a bad play. Or what did you say? Dumbshit? A dumbshit play. You can’t say it was a dumbshit play merely because it didn’t work. That’s a tautology! The trick play happened to be catastrophically bad on that unseasonably warm evening on natural grass on a first and ten from near midfield against the Giants’ charging linebackers, who were drawn in, it is true, by the handoff to Riggins. And of course one of those charging linebackers was Lawrence Taylor, who was really a kind of player the league had never seen before. Taylor himself could make a lot of teams’ plays seem, what you said, fucking asinine. But every play is in fact a limitless number of plays, depending on contingency. Not just the opponent’s play, but injury, wind and weather, field conditions, crowd noise, execution, personnel, and all of the special properties of the compound that is created by the two constituent plays. Bye. Peace. This was fun.”

  REALLY, any container of appropriate size would have worked just fine. An ice bucket, a duffel bag, an empty case of beer. Just something large enough to hold twenty-two ping-pong balls. In the early years, the men used whatever was handy, and there were never any problems. But eight or nine years ago Steven showed up with a huge lottery drum that he had built in his basement. The spinning drum rested on a detachable metal frame constructed of heavy metal poles that screwed together. The drum itself was a Plexiglas barrel with a small latched door on one end, and a superfluously large crank on the opposite end. The barrel would have held four hundred ping-pong balls. The commissioner spun the drum with the crank, then unlatched the door, reached into the barrel (often up to his shoulder), and drew out a ball on which was written one of the men’s names. One half of the drum was painted blue and red, with a Giants logo, and the other half was painted burgundy and gold, with an impeccably rendered Redskins logo. Consequently, the drum was ugly. The paint seemed to be coated with a scratch-proof, high-gloss polyurethane. The two halves of the drum, like the poles of the frame, could be taken apart for storage and transportation, though the disassembled unit remained gigantic and unwieldy. When assembled, the lottery drum was immense and foreboding, just far too massive and ornate and shiny for its simple purpose. Steven kept the dismantled drum and frame in a canvas sack, and the kit was commonly mistaken, even in a hotel, for a large camping tent. The men joked that the canvas sack would work just as well as the drum it contained. The men, almost all of them, strongly disliked and disapproved of Steven’s lottery drum. They could not, it is true, fault the design or the construction. Well, yes, they could. That was exactly what they could fault. The drum was too fancy. In fact, several of the men called it Fancy Drum. It was, after all, simply a tool. “It would be like, what if I decorated my jigsaw?” Wesley said one year, though in fact he did not own a jigsaw, or any other power tools, and always had his boards cut by the grumpy associates at Home Depot after waiting twenty humiliating minutes in the wood-cutting area, during which time the automated female voice on the store intercom said, over and over, “Special assistance needed in the wood-cutting area.” The men, most of them, despised Fancy Drum based on their sense of propriety or rectitude or congruity or harmony or aptness or accordance or seemliness or fitness or meetness or concord. The drum’s crank, it was evident, had been polished. “God, there it is,” one would whisper to another. “I hate that thing.” Countless threats against Fancy Drum had been made in the past several years, and consequently there was no real surprise, and no clear suspect, when one of the poles for the frame went missing.