I Am Garlic, Hear Me Screech
On playing a role
In May 2018, as the national college Ultimate Frisbee championships drew to a close, I lounged with my teammates around a metal table in a nondescript sports pavilion. Of this hard-fought weekend, all that remained now was a salty crust of sunscreen and dried sweat on my arms; the faint smudges of misapplied eye black around my mouth; and an unusual beard which, for reasons I no longer recall, I had shaven exactly half of.
“Hey guys!” said a voice behind me. “Anyone want to trade jerseys?”
The chatter around me died. Angling the clean-shaven side of my face over my shoulder, I saw a younger player from Minnesota Grey Duck, whose team had been knocked out of the tournament in pre-quarters. “I’m number eight,” the kid was saying, “so that would be ideal. But I’d take anything, really!”
Earlier that day, in the aftermath of our own season-ending defeat, I’d sat for a long time on a patch of grass overlooking the field and wept. Later, back at our hotel, I would write our coach a heartfelt letter about how grateful I was to have been part of such a special team: one that embraced weirdos, and organized mandatory screenings of The Babadook to promote “psychological resilience,” and hardly batted an eyelash when, for one tournament, I’d worn a cotton T-shirt with the words this boy has significant behavioral problems Sharpied on the back. Now all of that was over, and soon the world would become that much less wild, less full of possibility. Soon, I knew, I would be tasked with initiating hordes of dull-eyed teenagers to the mysteries of dead novelists and playwrights. How different I was, at this moment, from the lucky Duckling beside me with all his years of Frisbee ahead of him.
In response to the request, my teammates and I looked around and shrugged. Swapping jerseys was a loosely honored Frisbee tradition: not uncommon at tournaments, but hardly ubiquitous, and apparently one which no one here practiced.
“Here,” I said, fishing out two jerseys from my bag—a black and a white. “You can have these.”
“Seriously?” said the Grey Duck player. “I can just, like, have them?”
“Yup,” I said. “I’ve got way too many.”
“For free?” he said.
For the first time, I turned fully around to stare at him. “Do I look like a guy who fucks around?” I said.
The kid laughed nervously.
The irony—though I hadn’t thought about it before I spoke—was that at the moment of this question, my lips were smeared with black ink. My face was cleaved in two by a vertical line rendering me half boy and half man (or, perhaps, half man and half beast). I looked, in other words, very much indeed like a “guy who fucks around.” That was exactly what I looked like.
Of course, this persona—the one who shaved half his face for kicks, and asked discomfiting, borderline-nonsensical questions—had hardly emerged from nowhere. He had been cultivated lovingly over a period of many years, in the context of the particular group of people with whom I played. His name was Garlic. He’d been conceived one rainy, muddy tournament my junior year: the undisputed winning nickname over “Glart” and “Glorbis” and various other sobriquets my friend (Soybean) had spontaneously started cheering whenever I stepped on the field. By my fifth year on the team, it was difficult to imagine that I’d ever been called anything else.
Nor, at this point in my Frisbee career, was I under any delusions that I, Garlic, would ever become a star player. I performed one role and one role only: In our zone defense, I was the mark—the person who, along with the other two members of the cup, chases doggedly after whatever opponent happens to be holding the Frisbee. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but it was one I performed well, the primary qualifications being longer-than-average arms and a willingness to run a lot.1
It was also a role lent extra excitement that year by a new play call we’d come up with: Whenever the disc landed in the hands of an unskilled thrower on the opposing team, our sideline would yell “Lobster!”—an allusion, I believe, to the notorious lack of dexterity that crustaceans display with Frisbees. This was a signal for those closest to the Frisbee (i.e., me, usually) to clamp down with extra intensity, thus trapping the designated “lobster” beneath the “lid” of our “pot.”2 The strategy was a decided success, and to commemorate it, we even ordered special alternate jerseys with a lobster graphic printed on the shoulder blades. Affectionately referred to as “lobbies,” these became our preferred game uniform.
This was also the jersey I was wearing now, at the metal table in that nondescript sports pavilion, as I handed the Grey Duck player the black and the white throwaways I no longer needed.
Yet as he accepted his smelly bounty and walked off, I felt a twinge of guilt for how I’d treated him. I hadn’t meant to be a jackass—only act a little absurd to make my friends laugh. But I realized that by dispensing for free what he’d been ready to reciprocate, and by doing so in an aggressively jokey manner, I’d devalued something precious to this younger player. Here he was, offering up a chivalric exchange of arms between two fallen warriors—and I’d taken it as an opportunity to get rid of some crap I didn’t want.
If I could go back and do it all again, I’d try to explain. It wasn’t that the jerseys I gave him didn’t mean anything to me; it was just that I had so many others—uniforms I’d donned and shed anew through my years on the team, like layers of an exoskeleton, until I reached my final form. For me, sitting at that table with my teammates, one 2018 jersey was enough: the sweaty, crimson memento still plastered to my chest. My lobbie.
That one you can pry from my cold, dead cloves.
It was and continues to be my view that a healthy commitment to the madman theory of defense is also a valuable asset for anyone playing this position.
Was this the most considerate play call? No. But there was a national Frisbee championship on the line!
Incredible