Chris Bachelder - The Throwback Special

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.”