Stephen Florida: A Novel

by Gabe Habash

It’s good sometimes to have your face against something harder than itself. That way you’re never surprised by how hard contact is. If you believe the universe is a place of hitting, where one thing collides with another, the pattern repeating all over, your arms turn to cradles and you begin to want something to root you to your senses. I’m not saying it always has to be violent. My grandma had a tabby cat named Poker she found as a stray, and he liked getting in my lap and I was always giving him the ear pets he liked.

The only thing that’s expected of me is the only thing I want to do. That is called luck. Luck is to own a thicker meaning of existence, a place inside you shelled off from flabby friends and exhaustion without purpose: I’m on a one-lane road in a thick metaphorical forest with no distractions. Everything I do is intentional. To arrive at the end of the road is to know Glory in the biblical sense, to put your paternity in Glory.

if you turn your thoughts over to the nothingness of what’s here, nothing land, nothing people, nothing houses, nothing lakes, nothing cold in nothing bones, you can squeeze your happiness to a pinpoint—

you are here to wrestle other men like your oldest enemies, leave them damaged or worse on the mat, until you’re by yourself.

I’m conditioned to pay attention to what I’m seeing, not unlike how operation room lights make you pay attention. I never stop paying attention.

But if I have bruises on my ribcage, where would I be without them? I would not be myself if I didn’t have bruises on my ribcage. And though Paul Kryger wishes me to die, wishes me to leave Oregsburg and never come back so he can be the 133, he’ll never get it because he doesn’t want it as bad as me, and all I would like to tell him is he would be better if he wasn’t so angry, that is, if he wasn’t so stupid on top of being so angry, but I don’t tell him this.

And still, these silly classes I took make up what turns out to be my higher education. It will always be a part of what I am, things happen and then fall away, it’s no less permanent than what happens in a match. I have to live with all of it. And lately, twenty-one years of living with things has begun to wear thin. Eighteen years of living with it, then graduating to three more years of living with it, where all you do is live with it. I’m up to my neck in it, I’m stuck with all this history and it never leaves me alone. It’s enough to make you imagine what could’ve been different, to make you turn over small thoughts about whether what you are is what you should be, whether you’ve made the correct choice. I just need one thing to live with that I want to live with. That’ll be enough.

“What’s so good about wrestling?” Wrestling is a series of momentary ejaculations, passions that originate and evolve based on their relationship to another’s passions. Wrestling is, at its core, one passion set against another passion for the purpose of determining which is stronger. “I always liked it,” I say.

You’re only who you really are when you’re doing what you really want.

Tell yourself you’re not a wastrel,

He’s not scared of anyone, and he will not be scared of me, but he’s scared of himself if he loses.

It’s fucking snowing outside. It covers everything, the roofs, the cars, the bushes, the sidewalks, the dirt, the lightposts, steadily and thoroughly, like the smothering pillow over a deathbedder’s face. Students skate a few feet for fun on the ice, some fall, it gets on their hats and shoulders and they don’t wipe it off.

I also wonder if to work for something very hard necessarily requires pushing other people enormous distances away from you.

I’ve already booked two exhibitions here, and I’m doing it because I barely go to bed, and some of that is because I miss you, but most of it’s because I’m hustling my ass off. I hope you’re not wandering off into that swamp pit of yours, because I know what you’re like when you get like that. You’re like me. You have to keep the blinders on, you have to stay exhausted, it’s how you know you’re doing it right.

I nod my head like a Depression-era gentleman

I look in the rearview and tuck in my nose hairs.

It becomes an all-day job not turning into everyone else, keeping myself from old, tired dreams.