The Throwback Special Read online

  “That pole was here two hours ago,” Steven said to Trent, sitting on the floor of Room 324, searching the canvas sack once again.

  Trent asked if the drum had been in Steven’s possession the entire time. He asked if the item was insured. He asked if Steven felt he could definitively rule out those human resource reps from Prestige Vista Solutions.

  “It’s not funny,” Steven said.

  “You know,” Trent said, “the drum was always great in the conference room where we had plenty of space. But this year, in here . . .”

  The lottery was being held this year in Room 324. The room had two queen beds with diamond stitch comforters, an orange sitting chair, a desk, a dresser, a television, a mirror, a bedside table between the beds, a standing lamp, and four sconce lights. Above one bed was a framed watercolor of fireworks over a lake. Above the other bed was, as far as Andy could tell, precisely the same framed watercolor of fireworks over a lake. He stood between the beds, staring first at one painting, then the other, looking for minuscule differences. There were no differences that he could see.

  Beneath the window was a heating and cooling unit that ticked and clanked. Trent had parted the window curtains, both the heavy, scratchy primary curtain and the gauzy, membranous under-curtain so popular in hotels. The windows overlooked the dark wet parking lot. It was still raining.

  Most of the men had not yet arrived in the room for the lottery. They were resting or showering or watching television in their temporary rooms. Here in 324, Gil lay on one of the beds with his eyes closed. He needed a haircut. Trent flipped through a three-ring binder of laminated menus. Steven found the missing pole for the drum’s frame.

  “Here it is,” he said.

  “The remote control,” Myron said, “is the dirtiest item in a hotel room.”

  “Dirtier than the sheets?” Chad asked.

  Andy turned from the watercolors, and there commenced a discussion of the meaning of the idiom Fish or cut bait, which all of the men were accustomed to hearing. Trent thought it was basically synonymous with When the going gets tough or maybe If you can’t stand the heat. Myron was under the impression that the expression meant that one should just do something, anything. Get involved. If you don’t want to fish, fine, but then you should at least help those who do want to fish by preparing their bait. Trent wanted to know exactly what kind of bait required cutting. Steven, sitting on the floor and assembling the frame of the lottery drum, said everyone was wrong. Trent assured the men that the keg was on its way.

  The heating and cooling unit ticked and clanked. Gil’s leg twitched. That guy. His father had been a French horn player. He could sleep through anything. The men—Trent, Steven, Andy, Chad, and Myron—felt compelled by tradition to go ahead and try the shaving cream trick on Gil.

  “THERE YOU ARE, Charles,” Nate called from the foot of the crowded bed.

  Charles was sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard. He waved negligibly to Nate. The room was hot and loud. The men around the bed compared their devastating commute times with a kind of pride, converting liability, momentarily, into triumph.

  “Could we step outside for a minute?” Nate said.

  “No,” Charles said.

  Nate slid between Randy and Wesley, and then shuffled down the narrow alley between the wall and the bed. “I’m glad you’re here, Charles.”

  “I like those boots,” Charles said, wondering what size they were, and whether Nate might give them to him in barter.

  Nate looked down at his boots and shrugged. “Robert said I was not responsible for my thoughts,” he said. “But that doesn’t seem right to me.”

  Charles could not comfortably make eye contact with Nate from his seated position. His neck ached when he looked up at such a severe angle. He felt like a child, or a baby bird. This was no position from which to adjudicate pathology. Nate had a hairy throat, and a strong, though not unpleasant scent. Charles was the expert here, and this would not do.

  “Switch places with me, Nate.”

  Nate climbed over Charles’s legs as Charles spun them toward the wall, and stood. “Excuse me, Gil,” Nate said. “Sorry about that.”

  Now Nate sat against the headboard, and Charles stood beside and above him. This was much better.

  “You can help me, right?” Nate said.

  “Yes,” Charles said, “I can.”

  “What I said to my wife was that I was curious. That’s all I said. Sexually curious about them. And she acted like I had a big problem.”

  “Slow down,” Charles said.

  “Sexual curiosity is completely normal, right?”

  “Generally speaking, yes,” Charles said.

  “That’s what I told her,” Nate said. “That’s exactly what I said.”

  “But it does depend to some extent,” Charles said, “on the object of your curiosity.”

  “What?”

  “About whom are you sexually curious, Nate?”

  Nate looked across the crowded room. He waved, though Charles could not see anyone waving back. Then Nate turned his face toward Charles’s hip. “The women in children’s books,” he said quietly.

  “I didn’t hear you, Nate,” Charles said, though he had.

  “The women in the children’s books I was reading to our kids.”

  “I see.”

  “The illustrated women. You’ve seen them, right?”

  “Some.”

  “I mean, they’re women. There they are with breasts, hips, legs. The illustrators made them, not sexy, I guess, but definitely feminine. And I suppose technically speaking, these are not all human women I’m talking about. Some are squirrels or mice or rabbits, but they are female and they walk upright and they’re gentle, and in the drawings we see their housecoats and blouses and the definite suggestion of the female form. I wouldn’t say this about just any creature in the woods on a nature show. I’m not interested in animals.”

  “What are you interested in?”

  “These characters in the books have had children, so you know they’re sexually active. That’s not some sick thing I’m imposing on the book. And in some of these old books the mothers are so . . . Like in Blueberries for Sal? Do you know that one, Charles?”

  Charles said that he did know Blueberries for Sal.

  “So lock me up,” Nate said. “That mother is definitely someone I’m curious about.”

  “The woman,” Charles said, “or the bear?”

  “The way McCloskey crosshatched her long skirt? That’s all I’m saying, Charles.”

  “And her sweater,” Charles said.

  “I guess one thing I’m saying is that in trying to make these drawings not at all risqué or suggestive, the illustrators made them very risqué and suggestive. Does that make sense?”

  “Go on.”

  “I read the books to our kids, and occasionally I am curious about the women. Or the female animals. I didn’t say attracted to them. I didn’t say turned on. I said curious. The drawings are not indecent, and I would say my thoughts are not all that indecent, either. We have this old book that belonged to my wife when she was a kid. It’s my favorite. It’s about an elephant.”

  “In terms of my expertise—”

  “There’s this scene in the book when the elephant is performing at a circus, and there is a crowd of delighted people in the bleachers behind the ring. And if you look really closely, Charles, you can see these women sitting in the bleachers. They’re wearing tight knee-length skirts, and they have nice figures, and they look happy. Almost ecstatic, Charles. The picture isn’t vulgar, but . . . it stimulates the imagination. I’ve read the book a thousand times. I notice the women behind the elephant, right? Big deal. I think about their sexual histories. I wonder what they like to do in bed, either alone or with others.”

  “And this is a drawing?”

  “Colored ink. The old four-plate process, I think. But fairly realistic. It’s clear how happy the women are.”

  “O
kay.”

  “And yes, these women are depicted at an elephant show, but we know that’s not all there is to them. We know they have a private life that is off the page, away from the circus. So that makes me a pervert? Their sexuality seems to me to be, I don’t know, part of them. Right? It’s not something I . . . It seems . . .”

  “Intrinsic?” Charles said.

  “No,” Nate said.

  “Yes,” Charles said.

  “It’s not like it’s something I would ever act on,” Nate said.

  Charles pressed the back of his head against the wall. He had no idea what that would entail. “Why did you tell your wife?”

  “I just pointed out the women at the elephant show,” Nate said. “I don’t know why I did that. She didn’t seem to understand.”

  “I’ve seen this before,” Charles said, and Nate looked up at him with an expression that shifted from surprise to relief to disappointment. The room was hot and agitated. “You are processing this experience as sexual, but it is not.”

  “Yes, it is,” Nate said.

  “It’s not sexual,” Charles said, trying to earn the boots. “What you find provocative is the women’s happiness, and their privacy. You’re longing to know them, and they are concealed. Your curiosity is not fundamentally erotic. There’s nothing wrong with you, except the normal stuff.”

  “But I look at their breasts,” Nate said.

  “Your mind,” Charles said, “strives to put these images and feelings in a familiar context.”

  Nate suddenly seemed despondent. He would rather, it occurred to Charles, have been diagnosed as an untreatable pervert than as someone who was just lonesome. Apparently, he had forgotten that he had sought out Charles for reassurance or explanation. Nate had finished talking, and it also appeared that he had finished listening. He seemed miserable.

  Charles rested his hand on top of Nate’s head. He watched as Gary, Vince, and Fat Michael tried to carry the lottery drum across the room. Fat Michael just happened to be wearing short sleeves (in November), and the cephalic vein in his bicep bulged tyrannically. Go to sleep, all you pussies, Fat Michael’s cephalic vein said to the men who had gathered in Room 324. Sweet dreams.

  “Where?” Gary shouted to Trent. “Bathtub or hallway?”

  Then the keg came through the door. It advanced into the entryway, but stopped when it saw the lottery drum directly in its path. The lottery drum halted but did not give way. The keg and the lottery drum squared off in the narrow strait of the entryway, beneath the looming form of the ironing board. Myron looked startled, but he always did. The quiet standoff lasted perhaps a minute. This was not to be decided by feints or clever maneuvers. The men cheered as the keg lurched forward.

  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 l
istening cues to the pizza guy.