12/17/46--7/15/09

I am very lucky to have been born into the family that also contained my Aunt Eva, one of the most magical people I have ever encountered. She was alternatively referred to as a witch, a Satanist, a whore, and the life of the party everywhere she went. She took the older kids in the family to haunted houses around Halloween, where my mom had no interest in paying someone money to try and scare you. But Eva seemed to live for thrills and frills, all made up with no where to go, and she was the first woman I ever met who always wore wigs, I don't think I ever saw her natural hair. In the mythology of my childhood she looms large, sometimes through first-hand memory but also through the recollections of others in my family and this has colored my perception of this woman, who passed away in 2009, but is still very alive and vibrant, the aftereffect of a kinda charmed life, maybe even jinxed, but she was certainly an unforgettable character. I would like to share some of my memories, but thinking about only allowing for my stories to be heard provided but one reflection of this woman and who she was, but also to seek out the stories of my sisters and mother, and others who knew her. I haven't decided yet if I want to keep her anonymous to perhaps 'protect' her sanctity but then, the kind of lady she was, I think she'd love the hell out of it if the whole world knew her name. So maybe this is her helping me out with this? Wouldn't be surprised.

I can google my Aunt and I'm amazed at some of the things I've found, due to her being involved in the politics of a small town in Ohio, but there's other stuff too. I found this page called tributes.com and there was her brief obituary. They left out all of the good parts.

I didn't attend her funeral. She passed away in 2009, halfway through the summer. I know I should have, and I regret not seeing her one last time. It had been the summer of 1995 when I last saw her, the summer I fell in love with a beautiful girl; we had a small family get together for the Fourth of July. She seemed as wicked and as full of life as she had always been, even though she had endured some serious health problems but somehow managed to bounce back, and she still smelled the same when I hugged her, a scent I have never smelled before or since but unforgettable in my memory, the smell of sweet flowers wilting in a humid greenhouse.

My Aunt was the first person who demonstrated there may be an alternative to traditional methods of belief and spiritualism. I was raised in a religious family and we went to church every Sunday, and I took to certain sections of the Bible when I was very young, somewhat fanatically. According to some people, my Aunt was a witch, others said she conjured spirits, others say she worshipped the Devil. Honestly, I was too young to really fully understand what she practiced, but it amazed me and enchanted, even when 'bad' things would happen to her, that was as engrossing as hearing about her experiments with leaving tape recorders in graveyards overnight and then playing back EVP's of people moaning and babies crying. There were kid stories I heard about seeing the leftover remnants of rituals, of weird images appearing on the walls of the basement (where I'm assuming most of the rituals took place). Even driving past their house, years after they'd moved out, I would feel a charge, the tiniest voltage of an energy that I could barely process but certainly feel.

I don't know for sure how she grew up, if it was all just rebellion against authority, or if she just liked to shock and awe, because that was part of her repertoire, catching you off guard. Maybe she just made up some of the stories, perhaps fleshed them out to give my aunts and uncles and grandparents a figurative goose. There were tales of possessed Ouija Boards, of ghostly aura photographs depicting the faces of demons. And I know there's so much more that I am not remembering.

I remember my Grandmother recounting of Eva's experience with the Ouija. I think around this time there must have been a wave of popularity for mysticism in general and pop culture magic in particular. Eva had brought a board home, to where she was living with her husband and his parents. Apparently she used it frequently, at once both exploring and consulting, I'd assume. I don't know if you've ever used a Ouija board, but if you have, you know that, unless there's another pair of fingertips on the planchette it's going nowhere on the board. I've tried it in the past and just felt silly, but with two people there is a synergy that enhances the experience. Perhaps Aunt Eva had enough synergy to communicate with the other side, where the dead rest? I don't know. There are many schools of thought on what is happening when you use the Ouija. Maybe it's your subconscious, just telling you what you want to read (actually, I take back my previous statement. A third person is essential for serious Ouija use, as they act as scribe and intrepeter.) My Grandmother believed in evil spirits, and demons, and that a Ouija board was an invitation into your very soul from these tempestuous beings. And apparently, Eva caught the 70's equivalent of a computer virus when one of those evil spirits got in through the open gate and took over the board. Grandma told me in an empty room the planchette would suddenly glide across the surface as you watched from the doorway. The board would be put away for the night, only to be found set up in its regular space the next morning. I don't know what kind of things it told Eva, but it must have been too much for her because she decided it was time to get rid of it.

So, here it gets a little weirder. Grandma said Eva took the board outside and threw it into the burn barrel, only to come back with a gas can and matches. She tried to burn it but the board itself would not blacken or char. Nothing, it seemed, could destroy it or remove it from Eva's life. I don't know where the Ouija board finally ended up, but, as the story went, where the Ouija board had leapt by itself from the firry pit and landed, the grass was different. It left a nuclear mark, killing the grass, an indelible effect upon the blades as they would not be ever growing there again. And that's when Grandma showed me the spot in the yard, and yeah, it did kind of look kind of funny having so much overgrowth surrounding it, this dead patch of ground, and of course I believed it all. Why not believe in a world where there are other forces swirling around us, every day and we barely notice, but sometimes you can find a transistor to tune in a particular signal, to touch something others might label as evil but was perhaps malignantly maligned?

Many years later, as a curious teen, I found myself interested in the Ouija, and I wanted to look past the veil for myself, and this seemed to be the method not only the most commercially accessible but also seemed so taboo. I found that in my experiences certain messages do come through the ether, but I don't know how reliable that information is, since, like, you're seeking advice from a pressed board and a magnifying glass on felt tipped feet. Perhaps there remains a need in us from more primitive times when we still sought the conch of the presences of those who have passed on, ancestor worship reduced to something you can buy at Toys R Us (I think they still sell them there, but I don't think Walmart does.)

There were many odd superstitions I seem to have inherited, and with that birthright I have sought out the energy source of belief, following it back to the source for myself. And its taken me a lifetime, but on my way there she is, my Aunt, as tourguide and flamebearer in the darkness.

So I intend to return to her story from time to time, as I learn more about her and maybe others will come forward to help me tell about her. So try and not be alarmed.

And now, here's the Eagles classic, 'Witchy Woman."

TAKING A BEATING

I remember watching the movie 'Fight Club' and then, later, reading the novel, and that I understood there was redemptive power in the act of fighting, of fighting your way back to pure manhood, the glory of an ass-beating, the promise of freedom through rebellion. But I fixated on that taking a beating part. I felt Jared Leto's cheekbones being smashed in, and I knew there was no glory in that, no redemption.

I think maybe Chuck Palaniuk, or Brad Pitt or Ed Norton for that matter, never have taken a severe ass beating in their experiences. No glory at all. Everyone knows, when it comes to violence, it violates the rules of Christmas and every other ritual gift exchange, because here, giving is much better than receiving. I can still feel what it felt like when I punched my friend Kevin straight in the face, coming out of a hotel bathroom swinging. We were on a high school marching band trip to New York City, all the way from New Middletown, Ohio. And my roommates were engaging in a pillow fight I grew weary of early. I took a shower, came out to a darkened room, and was hit squarely in the face with a stiff pillow shot. I saw stars and punched straight out where Kevin's face happened to be and I felt his nose squish beneath my knuckles and I felt a sick satisfaction in knowing I escalated the action to make the pillow fight cease and ruined the good time with my fist. Everyone went to bed, or else left to go to another room, I don't remember, but I do remember sleeping soundly that night.

So, I know one's better than the other. Because, in a safe environment where you're surrounded by friends and fellows and you want to test the boundaries of your own strength and courage, sometimes you can do that, but most other times, you simply cannot. It will not happen so gently. I've been on the receiving end, one time in particular more worse than any others I can have the resolve to remember, but still somewhat transformative in my teenage psyche. I will recount this for you, despite in its retelling I feel much more the antagonist than I thought I remembered.

It was near Halloween, and the chill in the air of our small town betrayed a fast approaching winter. My sister Linda and I found ourselves gravitating towards the kids up the street, the mishmashed collection of Petersburg's best and brightest miscreants, and for a night somehow joined them in their evening festivities.

Someone said there was a hayride cutting through the outskirts of town. A truck hauling a hayload and a bunch of teenaged kids down black country roads, the kind that surrounded our tiny little town, swallowed up by murk and darkness. But, this wasn't so random of a collection. This was the high school marching band clique that I had been in the band with but never a part of, most of them at least, with their other friends.

And then someone in our group had eggs, cartons of them, and I was enlisted to accompany this ragtag band of egg throwing bandits, an egg in each hand, four or five of us, we took through backyards and alleyways to the edge of Garfield Road, to hide in the shadow of the hill next to the post office. And we waited, but not for long, because we heard the diesel huff of the truck's engine and saw the hayride coming down the street.

Someone said throw, and the eggs sailed through the air, but I hesitated, watching how they did it, and then mine hit the air following, both at once it seemed, and we heard the truck screech stopped. There came another simple command, then, maybe from the same voice. It said Run!

And so I ran, a fat little fourteen year old boy who'd thrown eggs blindly at a group of people, not knowing or caring what they hit. I'm sure it would have been fine if they just hit the street, short of their target. But they wouldn't be stopping if someone hadn't been splattered. We were seen and found ourselves in pursuit, through the small cemetery that was an island between two streets, a small stretch of military graves and ancient headstones that floated there, separated by the larger cemetery a half mile down around the corner. But in the darkness I found myself running faster than I had ever had to run before, and even still I could see my compatriots fading into the distance ahead of me. Maybe I was too concerned with tripping over a grave stone, maybe I was too fat to be chased, but the voices behind me got louder and angrier like a reverse Doppler, until I could feel them on top of me.

I stopped running. I just couldn't anymore. And they came to a stop then, behind me, and I felt the first punch land on the back of my head. It bent me forward, as I tried to cover up the best I could but the punches kept coming, in my back and uppercuts to my face and more punches to my skull, making me see purple sparkles behind my eyelids every time. Three or four dudes, just taking their shots and me, taken to screaming and blubbering and just being their heavybag. I told them I had nothing to do with the egging, that I was their friend, that I was chasing the kids who really did it. I didn't fall down, I don't know how but I knew if I did I could get kicked and stomped and I knew I didn't want that. So I cried a little and begged some and finally they stopped hitting me. They ran away triumphant, while I stood in between graves and refused to believe it was over.

I crept in the shadows to the store only a hundred yards in front of me, the corner store in the middle of town offered a shadowy retreat so I could collect myself and figure out how to get home. It was there where I examined myself to make sure I was intact. And I felt one of the braces connected to a front tooth was loose in my mouth, just spinning on the wire. Nothing else seemed damaged, no teeth actually missing. I didn't have a mirror to see how bad my face looked, but I forgot all about my face when I realized I had pissed my pants.

The pee stain on my crotch ran down my leg in a dark streak, the denim soaked to an inky black against the relief of the faded blue. I guess they hit the piss button in my brain, the one that tells me to go, and I went all right. To make matters worse, the hayride was still going on, this time now with a shared story of a beatdown and what if they caught me creeping home? I did not want that at all. I went down the back alley that ended on the edge of the Presbyterian church and avoided any detection, knowing the hayride couldn't fit down there. I climbed through the fence that separated our yard from the church and went in the front door, where Linda and a bunch of other neighborhood kids were hanging out and watching TV. Linda saw how jacked up I was and I may have began to cry at that point, but I don't remember, but she kicked them all out and drew me a bath and didn't mention the pee stain on the front of my jeans.

So there were many implications in this experience for me. Firstly, I realized I would probably see these guys again in some capacity, since I was still in high school band with them and we lived in an area with a severly small population. I went to church with one of the guys there, so I couldn't really get away from any of them. This was a problem especially since I found out I pee my pants when I get beat up, and did not look forward to peeing my pants in front of people in broad daylight. Secondly, I had escaped this beating with only broken hardware in my mouth, but it would have to be explained to my mother and my orthodontist, and so I decided my cover story was that I had fallen in gravel, thus explaining (I guess? I don't know why I emphasized the gravel part) my damaged braces and any facial discoloration. I also skipped Sunday services, out of fear mostly, and then began to dread going to school the following day.

But I went, and nobody had anything to say, including the kids who'd been throwing eggs with me. It felt like a non-event, and while I did not seek out the people involved with my beating, I don't feel like I was hiding, either. But when the bus dropped me off in front of my house, a car pulled into the alley and stopped in front of me. The window came down, and it was one of the boys who'd been there, I'm not sure if he was one of the punchers, but I knew for sure he'd seen it all.

"Hey Sam, you need to tell Jason Himes to leave us alone." I wasn't sure what Jason had to do with this situation, but I let him continue. "You cracked one kid's tooth and splattered eggs all over someone else, of course they were pissed off. He had to go to the dentist today to get his tooth recapped. But you tell Jason if he lays a hand on any one of us, we're coming back to take it out on you."

For some reason the scariest kid in town had threatened to give out multiple beatings to all guilty parties, Jason Himes, who had once threatened to murder me if I kept fighting with my neighbor Greg, while Jason was on his paper route. That had been two years prior but I was still terrified of him, but had had minor if any contact with him since. But Linda did, I guess. She went and explained what had happened to me, and he became my instant defender. Linda told me all of this, afterwards. For some reason Jason took my case, in a way.

So we existed in a state of detente, and Linda and I took up with Jason and his delinquent ways, the first real 'bad influence' upon us as my Mom would call him. But just know there's a treasure trove of stories about him I could share, but this is about getting a beating and living in the afterlife. The afterlife lingers and flickers and never really goes out, just as a reminder to fight with everything you have when you must absolutely have to. I will never piss my pants in battle again. And if I do take a whipping, I will not be ashamed to tell my Mom that her baby had just been beaten. There is no shame in that.

Shenanigans at Red Robin

A few years ago I had this funny experience that I'm about to tell about and I wanted to write it down and make people laugh like it made the people I'd told it to. I typed it up and asked my friend Evan who writes the blog at Swan Fungus http://www.swanfungus.com, if he'd put it up for me, and of course he did, because he is a sweet boy and has been a great friend for going on eight years now. I was too lazy to bother doing my own blog then, but here we are now, aren't we? Check out Evan's blog, he writes some funny stuff and shares some amazing weirdo music too. So here, in its unedited entirety, is my Red Robin story. Enjoy.

Perhaps there are many of you who have not met my acquaintance, but I’m generally regarded as Evan’s really good looking friend. The shy, sexy type. I look forward to Evan’s daily updates of his blog and am highly entertained by not only his writing talents but also his vomito-philia. I am honored that he’s given me the opportunity to pitch in here, and while I’m on somewhat of a short leash as to my potential content (read: no gross-outs for Mr. Sensitive), I do have an account that I’d like to share about a recent experience.

My day started out so wholesomely. We’d made plans, Lindsey, Donny and I, to spend the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m very cultured, you see, the kind of upper-crust individual who can appreciate fine works of art just as well as the next upstanding gentleman. It was a little crowded at the museum, as can be expected on a Sunday afternoon, but it did not inhibit my enjoyment of so many delightful exhibits. Satiated in our thirst for fine art, the three of us made our way home to New Jersey.

We decided to stop on our way home to eat at Red Robin. Red Robin, for the unaware, is a sit-down restaurant that sells endless variations on burgers, and they do have a few vegetarian-friendly selections for an herbivore like Donny, who’d never been before, so our meal was just as enjoyable as our afternoon at the Met. The check came, and I said I was gonna take a leak before we hit the road. Donny said he’d probably go as well, but remained sitting as I made my way to the bathroom.

Inside there was a urinal and a stall, and finding both not in use, I opted for the stall. I was pissing away when I heard the door open and someone stepped up to the urinal. I assumed it was Donny, because (a) he had just said he had to pee, and (b) the individual at the urinal was wearing a pair of Converse sneakers, just like Don had on. I could see the shoe plainly from my vantage point, and I decided to mess with my friend just a bit. I stepped down on the white toe of the sneaker, only I left my foot there for an uncomfortable length of seconds.

The shoe pulled out from underneath mine, rather abruptly. And then, nothing. No snotty Donny comment, no “stop being a shithead, Sam.” Nothing but a long awkward silence. I was done peeing by that time, so I turned to peer through the crack between the door and the partition, into the mirror facing us. I saw someone at the urinal, wearing a green vest.
Don wasn’t wearing a green vest that day. I don’t remember what he had on, but that wasn’t it.

I was trapped, horrified at my indiscretion. I’ve enjoyed a lifetime of antagonizing strangers in various fashions, but this was a new low, even for me. I’m not sure if it’s just a NJ thing, or the whole country’s in on it, but there’s a certain, how do you say, protocol for initiating anonymous gay sex acts with strangers in public restrooms. And it generally starts with stepping on your intended’s shoe. So innocent on the surface, yet so resonant with ill intentions.

I’d just cruised my first dude.

Time slowed to a crawl in there while I waited for the sound of a flushing urinal, or the splash of hands washing in the sink. Maybe he didn’t notice me hitting on him. But there was nothing. I cracked the door a little to find myself all alone. He must have made haste in exiting after my invitation.

I was rather embarrassed when I finally came out and recounted the experience to my crew. They died, all but rolling on the floor and drawing even more attention to my guilty conscience. Don finally went to the bathroom and said the kid in the green vest was back in there, apparently to finish the piss he’d stopped mid-stream. I reasoned panickedly that he’d seen me exiting the bathroom and had a face to put on the deviant. I was ready to leave, but Lindsey and Don had a good time drawing it out just to make me suffer. I still owe those bastards. We finally left, much to my relief.

How did I end up this way, I asked myself on the ride home. How did I become That Guy, the creepy stranger who brings an empty shopping bag into the restrooms so someone can stand inside to give the illusion of only one pair of legs in the stall? I can’t even grow a mustache, for goodness’ sake. I’m really not a sicko, I assure you (not that there’s anything wrong with anonymous gay sex). I don’t lurk in the Casual Encounters section on Craigslist looking for penises to put in my mouth. I’m as monogamous as I am heterosexual, which is a lot. But to that bewildered young man, I was a whole battalion of cocksuckers, hungry for load. And I’ll never be able to convince him otherwise. That’s the part that hurts.

Which leads me to the follow-up dilemma: what would I have done if he’d been into it? What if I’d seen his face looking back at me through the gap, eager to crack a nut? That the kind of subject Miss Manners doesn’t have the answer to. Would I had to have let him in the stall? I try to be courteous and conscientious in my day to day, but let’s just say in retrospect I’m pleased he chose to flee, rather than linger.

But not as pleased that I decided not to stand on the toilet and look over the partition to ask Donny what the hell his problem was for not finding my joke funny.

I would have been gaybashed for sure. And, for the first time in the history of gaybashing, I would have had it coming.

http://www.swanfungus.com/2008/04/cruising-at-red-robbin.html

Extreme Championship Wrestling

I would like to dedicate this blog post to my old friend Blaine Davis, who seemed to fall in and out of love with professional wrestling the same as me and my second favorite person to go to live matches with, the first is my wife, sorry Blaine. But you get it better than she does, man

This is about this ECW:


...not this 'ECW':

...but I digress...

I call this story, the time Lindsey took me to an ECW show and it Turned into a Riot, and it is one that I truly cherish whenever it comes to mind, and also one that captures us at a crazy moment in our lives, totally scary but after it's over we pretend like it was nothing major, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. I must start at the beginning. The very beginning.

As a child, I was obsessed with professional wrestling, the first time I really remember a storyline was when the WWF set up the feud with Don Muraco spitting on the Superfly, Jimmy Snuka. My little kid brain was convinced that spitting on someone was just about the most lowdown you got, and the Magnificent One had one coming. Security swarmed the Superfly, trying to hold him back so as to not maul his instant adversary. And sure, I can sit here now and think about watching that on the TV and being hypnotized by the event transfolding, but to me it was magic, magical battling and the eternal struggle of good and evil.



And I adored Mr. Snuka, and soon my whole family knew it because all of a sudden I had a Superfly poster in my bedroom and my brother-in-law Eric was taking me to wrestling matches at the Struthers Fieldhouse, where I watched all those warriors depict the Dramas of the Ages, even as I began to root more for the side of the heels.

So the majority of my lifetime at this point has consisted of an ebb and flow of watching wrestling and pretending it didn't exist anymore. I tuned in and out, for various eras and changes, and by the time my wife and I had moved with our friend Jay to New Jersey, leaving Ohio for the east, I had become a somewhat dedicated fan of the product that ECW was creating out of Philly. This was professional wrestling that had stirred the embers of my burnt out love with my childhood visions of the out of control and the reckless display. I was able to find on one of the local channels in the Kent/Akron area that played the ECW tv shows at two in the morning, purchased as infomercial timeslots but used to showcase the story lines and brutality of the independent federation. Then the guy I worked warehouse with at Gabriel Brothers taped the Barely Legal PPV and lent it to me. The Eliminators made quick work of the Dudleys, Taz is there, against Sabu in a grudge match I do not understand, and Terry Funk sacrificed his body and career to put over a whole gosh darn locker room of rebels and misfits and misunderstood workers who could reinvent themselves. It was so captivating and raw, it felt personal to me, the experience of feeling like a fan of this otherworldly product.

I never got a chance to see a live ECW event in Ohio. I think back then they may have passed through Cleveland but I either didn't know about it or didn't dare venture outwards. But we made the leap to NJ, into moving into a house of three others, plus my wife and I--and I kept taping the late night show because a channel on our cable carried it. But somewhere I found a flier that said they were going to do a house show in Elizabeth, NJ and my heart stopped and I started scheming.

I didn't scheme much. I told Lindsey and she told me she'd take me, so we had to go to Elizabeth to pick up the tickets in person for some reason, I guess it wasn't that kind of show. Had to pick them up in a record store down the street from the place where I saw my first real life pimp, leaning on his pimp mobile, like living the lifestyle or else doing a heck of an impersonation. It was that kind of place. Since then, I have noticed there is a prevalent smell that is exclusively Elizabethian in timbre, unforgettable but that day unnoticed due to the living breathing Diorama of a stereotypical ghetto, and we're just buying tickets on a Sunday night? You have to understand existence in Ohio was somewhat limiting in such otherworldly movie scenes. What I saw was the real thing, and we were going to come back to see ECW in a high school gymnasium. That was daunting. What was also daunting was ECW's penchant for turning the fans' seating areas into warzones, splattering across collapsed folding chairs and delighted fans, but I was not so worldly and didn't think that what I'd been watching could seem too real. I was well old enough to know by then wrestling was arranged, but that was when I realized what these guys put their bodies through to entertain their fans seemed a bit on the mideval side. But I loved it, and wanted to be a part of it like a little boy again, the kid who insisted on watching every Saturday afternoon and then with more and more frequency, hypnotized.

So, we know Elizabeth's kinda scary, but the area we go to is pretty uninhabited and kinda quiet and unlit. And we had to walk a ways to get from the car to the gym, so as we got closer it got louder and once we walked in the smell and the sound and the calibre of the people just about broke one under my nostril. The crowd seemed edgy, not just there to have a good time but there because they were there to see something chaotic and bloody and cathartic. We felt so young and out of place, like real outsiders, but no one seemed to take any notice of us. And then the show started, and everyone's attention was on the ring.

(Believe me, he used to be a serious badass, don't let this picture with Eric Young fool into believing otherwise.)

I can't remember the opening match, it was an obvious squash but still you were unable to take your eyes away. Taz wrestled second or third on the card, which was intense, when Taz was pushed as a badass worker you had to believe he was a cocky, arrogant badass, even though his opponents towered over him at times. I was buying it, at least.

But all in all, the card was wild and crazy but didn't really push the envelope much until the second to the last match. It was a three way dance, with Sabu, the Franchise Shane Douglas, and Tommy Dreamer, who seemed to be replaying the role his mentor Terry Funk played a few years prior in a similar stipulation.

(Replace Funk with Tommy Dreamer and this is kinda what it looked like, and they did not do the triple sleeper routine in homage of that magical matchup.)

It was not that epic battle, no it was more of a smash and grab match of high spots and a down the stairs bump that Tommy Dreamer took down the bleachers, and landed at my feet. He slowly stood, and I asked him if he was all right. "Yeah," was all he said and he cut through the front row to reenter ringside.

(Bleachers like these->)

So, my wife had purchased us second row seats to this thing. I guess general admission would have been all right by me, but she has a hard time seeing at events like this, so I think she wanted to get up close and enjoy it with me. Well, it may have been just a bit too close. I don't know how many rows were set up around the ring, but Dreamer had rolled to a stop at the second row, through tipped chairs and a tangle of legs and bodies of people who were too entranced to move out of the way. But he was fine, and they worked the finish, and I couldn't tell you who won. Honestly the whole spectacle of it all wiped that memory away.

I do remember, though, a tenseness passing through the crowd when they knew which match was left: the Dudleys versus the newly cobbled team of the Gangstanators, formed from the leftovers of two great teams whose missing members had moved on from the Philadelphia federation. I was not so naive to believe even then that this match would be anything but chaotic, but I guess I really didn't put myself fully into the situation.
The whole Dudley entourage came out and did their pre-match routine, taking turns on the microphone to bait the hot crowd ever further. I think at that time they were finally coming into a gimmick that seemed to veer from their comedy roles they had played in ECW and were becoming serious heels who drew heat. As much as I admire him now, I hated Joel Gertner and how smug and self-assured he was. He was an unheralded genius as the team's, what, personal announcer? He was great later on the product's commentary but he had that window to say such angering things. And they were so smug, so smug to make you boo them even harder, and then a sound blared over the PA system, a sound of breaking glass that was unmistakably the first few seconds of New Jack's entrance music.

Dre's sliding synth would kick in and you'd hear the approach before you saw New Jack


and John Kronus

coming down the entrance, through the exploding crowd.

It wasn't a wrestling match, in any sense of definition. It was World War Three, all in capital letters, the sensory overload of the men attacking each other with big swinging fists in every seeming direction as it spread from the ring to the floor, and from the ringside area it kicked over the barricade and entered the fans' space. And you had to move as the crowd surged, we were so tightly packed from the seats behind us that had gotten collapsed into the sea of chairs covering the gymnasium floor. We held our own the best we could, knowing it would have been somewhat unsafe attempting to weave through the crowd. Bodies would part and Big Dick Dudley was beating Kronus with his crutch, full overhead swings that went wild through people. More than one person was already bleeding, and there was blood on the floor, red on yellow, just feet before me.

(Imagine blood all over this.)

And Natural Born Killaz kept playing, kept looping through the PA. It never stopped. It was the team's sole introduction and kept tensions high with electronic beats and shrill treble making everything vibrate. I looked to the ring and saw New Jack with what looked like was an X-Acto knife that he was using to carve the forehead of Bubba Dudley, forgoing any code of kayfabe and allowing the crowd to see the real bloodshed that disregarded any trade secret. He held him in the corner and worked at a wad of scar tissue until it flowed like a spigot. Things just seemed to be in the stages of collapse, and the crowd fed off the blood sacrifices on offer and became enraged, almost hostile as a form of worship. I began to fear for our safety. The security on hand were there in some unknown capacity, mainly to move the crowd out of the way when they would do their crowd spots, but in this melee, they seemed to be feeding. Less than an arm's length away a security guard had seized a kid, maybe 14 years old, and put him in a front facelock, similar to the chokehold Taz would use as his finish. But this kid's limbs were flailing and when I realized security had no intention of protecting the crowd, Lindsey and I seemed to agree telepathically, and then verbally confirmed, that leaving would probably be a good idea. Somehow we began weaving, desperate not to trip on a chair or a fallen wrestler. We cut back then across the gap between the crowd and the now empty bleachers. At the door of the gymnasium, I looked back, like Lot's wife, and while I did not turn into a pillar a salt I took a mental Polaroid of the chaotic carnage we were leaving behind. Natural Born Killaz was still playing and nothing could be seen but surging crowd.

Walking briskly back to the car, suddenly the shadowy streets of Elizabeth were not so easily fearful, even getting lost coming home did not phase me. But every time after that, I watched the shows and PPV's with a certain reverence, like I had shared in this thing they were fashioning for themselves, a kind of wrestling program that wasn't family friendly but rather an edgy alternative to staleness in the industry. They would go on, all of them, to change the business of wrestling in many ways, changes for the better and worse, but none so intense as the first time. There was a rise and fall to its history, and several attempted reinventions, but you have to deal with the law of diminishing returns here.

A few months later, I had heard of them doing a card in Woodbridge, a closer area to our home, a place we were somewhat familiar with, and we got tickets. In General Admission, for the better for everyone involved. In that short span of time the fire of ECW kept getting hotter, and the crowd was bigger but also a little younger, and just as vile and vulgar and just epic was the product. Maybe you gotta be up close to really feel the heat. All I remember is that New Jack had a singles match against Bam Bam Bigelow, and by that time he was the foreign object guy, something you could label and then so somehow contain it easier. But we still got up and sat in the back for the match. Lindsey wouldn't even look at the ring while New Jack was out there, just staring at her shoes.

This poor girl, I thought, I've scarred her forever. But she loved me enough to bring me back and even took me to a WWF show the next year, in stadium seating that was safely attached to the floor. And we've been to several Ring of Honor shows in Edison as well, I don't know if she realizes just how amazing the matches we saw were, but the first ROH she got us second row seats that happened to be on the rail on the entrance ramp, and she wanted to touch them as they walked by and got mad when Austin Aries punched her outstretched hand.

One show we went to, she had decided to get up and go out of the Inman Arena and moments later, American Dragon Brian Danielson pitched Samoa Joe into our section, and went back into the ring for a suicide flip straight into the mess of crowd with Joe at it's center. On his way down he full on kicked this girl in the head, who took it like a champ. There I was again, in a sea of broken chairs and overweight fans too lethargic to move, and instinctively I went to pull Lindsey from the melee and fight our way out, but I remembered she was out on adventure, so I gave in to the insanity of the moment and surrounded the fallen wrestlers and cheered and yelled when the match went to a 60 minute finish.

I found her afterwards. I think she met Prince Nana, she said, and when I told her she'd just missed one of the most amazing wrestling matches I'd ever witnessed, she kind of went on with her business (whatever business Lindseys take care of when they're bored at a wrestling match), and I basked in the afterglow alone all the way home.

Listen to the theme song from this story:

COME GET US

I have been stranded, once, right in the middle of everywhere. I've watched every bus pull away, I've seen the parking lot empty and then the workers went home some time after. We were there for it all, seeing Carlos from Interpol getting into a small car full of women. And then they were gone, too, but there we were, waiting for a way to get off the island, surrounded by the ruins of an abandoned civilization, we were stranded, out of luck, shit out of luck, to be truthful.







The four of us, me and my wife Lindsey and our friend Evan and his date, Ian, we met up in Metropark and traveled together in Lindsey's black Neon, the windows tinted barely legal black, through Turnpike traffic to the Curiosa festival, a traveling circus parading as a rock touring show, headlined by the Cure, and supported by a slew of great bands, and while I am not much of a fan of outdoor concerting events, I agreed to attend. There were many great bands on the bill, but Lindsey was just giddy with Cure fever.

We were pulling into the parking lot, being herded through the parking maze on Randall's Island, the location of our concerting experience. It felt like the final snap of a bended paperclip, the way it sounded, but just a giant pop somewhere underneath us, inside the car with us. And then came the trembling of the Neon, the violent rumblings somewhat like a car shaped paint mixer, just as we were rolling into the parking spot. It shuddered one last time as Lindsey cut the engine.

I'm sure the smart thing to do in that situation, of course, would have been to call a tow truck and get someone there to ascertain the damage of what had happened. But we didn't. I think, me at least, I think I thought it would somehow repair itself magically as we attended our concert, like some sort of accidental happening. But we had to pee from the long car ride, and I needed a smoke, so we headed towards the grassy gates of the concert area, a real cool setup surrounded my murky trees, a vast rolling hill gave way to an even vaster spread of flat land heading right towards the stage, which was massive.

I was, temporarily, distracted, from the direful car situation by the allure of loud music and keeping hydrated and trying not to burn in the daylight, being so fair and all. We watched Mogwai play on the big stage, a great big rumbling barrel full of sound, and Muse was a fantastic experience, maybe without the Mercury trip they've seem to taken, but still a good cathartic thing, like drano holy water.

We finished watching Interpol's set about halfway through the field, a sea of people filling in the green with one massive biomass, deeper and deeper. The stage looked a mile, two miles away. The Cure began to perform, and my wife was suddenly disappeared, like a shot through the crowd. We trundled after her, us boys, tired and confused by Lindsey's gazelle like movements, closer and closer, closer than for comfort for me or the guys. But I didn't want to lose track of her, so she finally got comfortable in a spot and danced and screamed and was amazing to watch. And the Cure were good, too.




We saw the bassist from Interpol in the crowd, watching like a fan, and Lindsey got very excited and I took a shitty cell phone picture of them that I'm sure she has stored somewhere in a digital archive, he decked in the liederhosen and suspenders. He didn't seem annoyed, he was into it.



And then, like it always has to happen, the show ended, and the lights came up all over the island, all lights pointing towards the parking lot, to our dire fate that had yet to reveal its truly ghastly facade. It was a long walk back, I watched how everyone got into their cars and exited in an orderly drunken fashion. There was a bus that drove people back to Manhattan, back to the mainland, and policemen were directing the traffic. I found one and asked him to look at our car, and he told us what we didn't want to hear: the front axle was broken.

i think at that point the three of them got out their cell phones and began trying to make arrangements to get us and the car picked up, towed someplace closer to home, They called parents and AAA and there was a lot of being put on hold and nobody calling back. The cops wished us luck and went home or whatever. We were stuck.

Nothing was lining up with finding a towing company to dispatch someone out to come get us. Suddenly the idiocy of local politics played a factor in our psychodrama. Technically, Randall's Island is not considered a part of any of the boroughs. It was, however, in its history, home to an orphan asylum, an idiot asylum, a burial ground for the poor, and an old-school reform school. To us it was our prison, a holding cell purgatory kinda feeling, while we frantically now attempted to at least get us home, meaning to deal with the car the day after but even that put us in a dead end. Nobody wanted us, nobody wanted to help us, we were plum fucked and just about out of options. And I don't remember if it was my idea or Lindsey proposed it, but someone spoke what the other one was thinking.

We would drive the car, broken axle and all, off the Island, if not to make it all the way home, just make it far enough to inconvenience someone into rescuing us.

Evan and Ian thought our plan was insane, but it was like three in the morning and sometimes at three in the morning you think crazy thoughts when you've been stuck in a parking lot all damn night and you're sweat sticky and so tired. And it made sense to me, to drive the car out the entrance and hopefully make it far enough into a major motorway so someone would have to tow us, due to us clogging the arteries of the New York highways, and hopefully not get run over in the process. The boys got a cab company to come pick them up and take them back to Ian's house. They told us to come with them, but we resisted. We had a drive to take. They went away, the neon light fading, our Neon parked there wounded, broken, and just about good for nothing. We got in, Lindsey behind the wheel, me as passenger, and she started it up, and pulled forward right as we felt the first shudder turn into a full blown vibration, the steering wheel jumping in her hands, so hard you felt your insides slosh and she stopped, and said,
'Put on your seatbelt, this is going to be a bumpy ride…'




(Totally didn't happen. It's just she hates the one-liners from movies that would have been perfectly appropriate here. But, I wanted to get her goat.)



And it shook the shit out of us, driving 10 miles an hour crosscutting the marked out parking lot, out onto a ramp, a wide spiral that dumped us out right onto the FDR Expressway, shaking like a seizure, like hydraulics gone mad, the wheels spinning gyroscopes on a pinwheel stick, we were barely contained by our seat belts. Anything over fifteen mph felt like you were dematerializing into another dimension, some sort of quantum breakthrough as cars whizzed by, their horns blaring. We crept closer to the shoulder, awaiting the end, the final demise when the car wouldn't go any further, we died then, not us but our sense of motion. It gave a grinding death rattle, just to say goodbye, and suddenly we were very still and very aware that we didn't make it all the way off the road.

We sat very still, as if our movements would have us get rear ended or side swiped. It felt close sometimes.

Lindsey called 911, and they sent out a towtruck. They put the Neon on the flatbed and we rode in their backseat of their truck, down the turnpike and then to local roads when we hit the Parkway. We did make one stop, in a shadowy part of somewhere, they stopped and the one guy went to buy booze for the trip to NJ, which they shared in the front of the truck. The ride felt like an extension added to forever, I faded in and out until we pulled into Matawan, where they left the car in front of our apartment complex. They wrote up a bill of 550 dollars, for which I numbly wrote a check for. I didn't know if we had it in the account, but I still paid them while we walked into our apartment at six in the morning. We crashed hard, and I woke up mid-afternoon when Lindsey said Evan was stopping by on his way to get his car.

He seemed a little shocked by our decision, but he only knew us as daredevils, at the dealers with the inevitable. I zoned out while Evan sat on our couch and played with his soda bottle and smiled like he does, and I went back into my coma. Lindsey arranged to have the car repaired, and we kept it for a while, and I eventually inherited it as my car when she got another ride. I eventually killed the Neon with a lethal one-two combination. First, I was pulling out my parking lot at work, a left past the cars who couldn't go, someone waved me on and I didn't notice the car driving up the turning lane. We had a minor fender bender that totally sucked, but the car seemed repairable, So, I was scheduled for the cosmetic work to be done and one day I'm driving home down Route 1 South and I notice it doesn't do nothin' when I step on the gas pedal. I was slowly decelerating through a thick flow of traffic and I had to coast and weave until I could pull it into a parking lot , which just happened to be the parking lot of our local adult emporium. I called Lindsey and told her the bad news, and her and Stefanie and Alley came and picked me up and fed me cookies, and another tow truck came and took her away. She was gone, and I got a new car, who never shakes or fails me at crucial moments. And that is dependability money cannot buy.


And this is Evan:

kissface

Menses and Menarche

I didn't start out wanting to be a writer. I wanted to be a professional wrestler or a child evangelist before I had the urge to write. It wasn't until I was in the sixth grade and had Mrs. Carlson for my English teacher. Somehow I had decided to write a story around that time about a murderous deck of playing cards (titled, effectively enough, In the Cards…) and I showed her my hand-scrawled pages and she read them and told me she'd type out anything I hand-wrote, so I kept writing weird tales and got weirder I think, but she kept up through my sixth year of school. It did something funny to my imagination to have an opportunity to make things puppets and the arrangement of the tragedies and miscommunications was a mystical thing for me to do. Soon after I confiscated my sister's word processor and wrote notebooks full of cryptic broken poetry with no rhyming scheme or pattern, just lines of what looked good to write. And I made stories, and pamphlets and leaflets for a long time, like I was creating an arsenal.

It allowed me, in part, to live outside of my own life at times, allowing the escapism of it all disappear me into fantasy and daydream, and the recollections were my journals. And writing has flickered on and off throughout my life, leading me into the occasional odd headspace or neurotic fugue but then flowing out with the shower water. But, I want to put down somewhere what I have in my head, dumping out the contents onto an unmade bed and just sort out the shit and get it over with, maybe, but more like put it on a petri dish and watch it squirm under the heat of the halogen lamp. I have an obligation to myself, to pursue this and to allow this mess to be read and misunderstood, but it is what I have to share and something worth pursuing passionately.

So, if I may have this indulgence, I will share my words with a semi-invisible elect who will judge and justify with reason, things and recollections and maybe just a feeling, but just something somewhat regularly. I have every intention to be punctual, but truly I say I can't imagine being faithful to a clock in number.
Sometimes I will find something from my archive to not only share, but to interpret the interpreter, so to speak, and write of the aura around these experience.

I find my thoughts these holiday seasons turned to the departed, from one's inception forward, those who have gone away but never all the way really. We really do wear the imprint of those who's lives we have touched. They linger with us there, in the still, in the times most trying, in their most joyful. We never really ever forget the dead, except through neglect of memory, of the threat of a cold front passing before the moon to obscure her beams. We know they are there for us, there so close, here but not here in the in-between, there is a conduit that connects us still. And we honor them, and yet we can feel so distant performing these rituals and perhaps there needs to be something to stir the monotony of repentance and regret and somehow allow a spiritual reconvening in your life this winter season, maybe just to revaluate and seek the guidance lost to this generation and lost to so many others. Is this ancestor worship or just threads keeping the web from falling apart? Is this anything else but just a provision, just perception, isolated to a single strand.











How long was this meant to last?



I'm not so sure anymore.