Read Online The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder - Free Book Online Page A

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’sleg 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.
    â€œGuys?” Trent said.
    â€œOkay, 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.
    â€œLot 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 breadsticksto dramatize a boating accident he had witnessed last summer. All of the men, almost all of the men, licked the sauce from their fingers.
    â€œShould we begin?” Trent said.
    â€œGuys?” Trent said.
    â€œHey,” Trent said, waving a ping-pong ball above his head. “Guys.”
    â€œGuys, should we begin?” Trent said.
    â€œLet’s go ahead and get started,” Trent said.
    â€œGuys,” 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.
    â€œ. . . 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.
    â€œAnyway,” Gil murmured, “it’s a farmhouse sink. The thing is one hundred and fifty pounds.”
    â€œAnyway,” Tommy said quietly, “the walls are plaster, so there are those strips of wood lathe underneath.”
    â€œAnyway,” Robert whispered, “after that, I shelled out for snow tires.”
    â€œLong 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 goodjob 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.
    â€œPeople 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