You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (15 page)

“You’re going to hell!” Hermie said, now wiping away the beginnings of a tear.

As he stomped his flip-flopped foot pointlessly into a
growth of pop-gums, I watched with increasing amusement, finally catching his eye just long enough to flip him off.

“Hell! Hell! That there just seals the deal!” Hermie hollered.

I’d have to do a good deal of catechism refreshment for loving Hermie’s misery so much.

“We had a deal!” he yelled with a fierceness I wasn’t altogether expecting. Hanging at his sides, Hermie’s fat little fists were balled up so tight it made the freckles disappear right off his knuckles.

I cupped my hand behind my ear and shook my head. I can’t hear a word out of your freckly-lipped mouth, I was letting him know. Which, obviously, wasn’t the truth at all.

“What’s up Hermie’s butt?” my friend Deb asked, having maneuvered her bike under the overhang beside mine.

“I got the poster first,” I said.

“Don’t look like he’s taking it too good,” she said, causing us both to laugh because now Hermie had taken to jumping up and down on the pop-gums like a damn fool.

“It’s mighty hot out, Hermie,” I hollered. Deb ripped open a skinny little sleeve of Lance’s salted peanuts and, just as we’d done a million times before, poured half the contents of the bag into her Co-Cola and handed me the rest. We switched off and shared like that, first me buying the peanuts and then Deb. This was a concept Hermie was going to have to learn the hard way.

“Shut up!” he said, continuing to stomp and getting redder and redder in the face.

I wasn’t sure if seven-year-olds could actually have a stroke, but Hermie looked like he was headed that way.

“Both of y’all need to grow up,” said Deb, wiping some stray peanut salt off her cheeks with the back of her hand. “It’s just a stupid wrestling match. Who cares anyway?”

Who cares???

Deb, dressed in a ruffly midriff shirt and madras shorts she’d bought with money from priming tobacco, had no time for such pursuits. At fourteen, she was far more interested in finding a boyfriend with a car who she could go “ridin’ around” with on Friday night. This is what passed for entertainment back in rural eastern North Carolina in the sixties and seventies, and may still, for all I know.

Maybe wrestling was something I’d grow out of, but I doubted it. My idea of a good time had nothing to do with getting in some fool’s car and riding around the Dairi O something like seven hundred times in a row while Steppenwolf howled from the eight-track.

No, when I was twelve, a good time was defined by eating an entire box of Crackin’ Good butter cookies (always on sale for fifty-nine cents a box at Winn Dixie) while watching the wrestling matches on TV every Saturday night.

It should be noted that no one in my family shared my passion for wrestling. In fact, the only person in my immediate world who understood how I felt about wrestling was Hermie, an unlikely soul mate who was crying his little heart out.

Looking at the broken little boy, sitting red-faced on a cushion of weeds, I felt like a monster.

A monster with the coolest damn poster of them all. Because I loved George Becker and Johnny Weaver better than all of the other professional wrestlers put together. There had been brief flirtations with others, but George and Johnny were my favorites, and nothing would ever change that.

I wasn’t alone in my obsession, or else how could they have raised so many thousands of dollars from truly poor people who would stand in line more than an hour to sit in the sweaty, smelly Armory? Usually it was a fund-raiser with a smallish percentage going to the volunteer fire department to buy a Jaws of Life or maybe the Ruritans’ building fund, so you could even say that it was noble to attend these events. Not so noble, perhaps, to shotgun beers out in the parking lot ahead of time like some of the kids did, but nothing’s perfect.

I wasn’t old enough to go to a wrestling match at the Armory by myself, so I had to settle for watching my heroes on TV. When that nasty little Japanese wrestler (I forget his name on purpose) took out a drawstring bag of salt hidden in the waistband of his shorts and tossed the contents into George and Johnny’s eyeballs, I jumped up from my chair, scattering flower-shaped butter cookies all over the oval braided rug on our living room floor.

“Y’all know he’s sneaky!” I’d shout, talking to the TV just as if my boys could hear me and correct their behavior.

“Educated people don’t watch this sort of thing,” my mother huffed as she walked by and scowled at the cookies on the rug. “You know it’s all fake, don’t you?”

I had an answer for that awful question right ready.

“If it’s fake, then why does Dr. Dawes believe in it enough to buy out fifty front-row seats every single time the wrestling comes to the Armory?”

My mother shook her head. She didn’t have an answer for that and, frankly, no one else did, either.

Dr. Dawes was as close as you could get to a real, live saint walking and living among us. He healed people and saved lives and birthed so many thousands of babies (me included) that he was even written up as “Tar Heel of the Week” in the Raleigh
News & Observer.

“You think the Tar Heel of the Week wouldn’t know if something was fake or not?” I asked, sensing that I’d found the perfect vulnerable spot.

My mother shrugged sadly and left the room, unable to offer any sort of rational explanation for this man she loved and respected being caught up in something so obviously moronic.

But there sat Dr. Dawes at ringside—I saw it with my own eyes one night when I was in my twenties—the same scrupulously clean and oddly elegant hands that had caught thousands of babies and comforted thousands more sick souls, clenched into fists balled up just like little Hermie Drucker’s on that long-ago day. At seventy-five or so, Dr. Dawes shouted, slung popcorn, and all but crawled into the ring himself to right a perceived wrong.

“Settle down, now, Doc,” the referee said, trying unsuccessfully not to grin. No doubt, Dr. Dawes had delivered the
referee into the world along with anyone else under about the age of fifty that happened to be in the audience.

In the newspaper, it had been noted that Dr. Dawes had “even delivered three sets of Siamese twins!” This was, of course, before political correctness would water that down to the clinical “conjoined twins” that is used today. Face it: When the bad-guy wrestler in the ring with an Asian heritage is nicknamed “The Yeller Menace,” it’s fairly obvious that no one frets much about racial stereotypes.

The stereotypes were in glorious form in the wrestling ring. Maybe that was the appeal of the whole thing to someone like me who liked everything simple and orderly. The good guys looked good, and the bad guys wore hideous tight masks over their faces and scowled and spat. Good looks helped. Over the years, I switched my shallow loyalties to a wrestler named Mike Rotundo, whom I once drove a hundred miles to see in person at somebody else’s crappy National Guard Armory.

Years later, long after little Hermie Drucker had become a highway patrolman much respected by all of the community and I had become a newspaper reporter not respected by much of anybody, I had the chance to go to a wrestling match again. I’d volunteered to do a profile on the state of rural wrestling fund-raisers, arguing that they were practically nonexistent thanks to cable. I’d done something similar on womanless weddings and on people who make clothes out of beer cans and a whole bunch of other Southern anomalies.

“Maybe nobody goes anymore because they finally figured out that it’s all fake,” said one snooty reporter who had moved south from Connecticut. “It’s not like it’s a real sport.” He put little quote marks in the air when he got to the word “sport.”

I chuckled at the image of what this annoying-ass Yankee boy would look like after a few seconds in the ring with my old crush, Mike Rotundo. Stewed squash, that’s what.

Showing up with pad and pen, I was going to do something that I was doing a lot of lately, much to the delight of all the Yankee transplants, and that was to tell them about the way it used to be.

Stepping into a pitiful gym with peeling paint, thirty-eight miles from the nearest Starbucks, I watched a young local make his debut in the ring.

He called himself Mean Mike Brash. Trouble was, he wasn’t mean at all. Just a very young, pale, and rather slightly built blond-haired boy who thought high school was overrated and was chasing his dream right off the TV screen and into this dilapidated gym. It was for a good cause, as usual. In this case charity began, and ended, at home. Proceeds would help buy paint for the gym.

Thank goodness his tag-team partner, the “Dark Knight,” was more savvy. He played to the crowd, pretending to throw a chair at a little girl who screamed and hid behind her eighteen-year-old daddy’s skinny legs.

Once the match started, with the good guys wearing red, white, and blue and Mean Mike calling a little bent-over
country woman who was booing him from the front row “you toothless ol’ hag,” I felt right at home.

It had been too long. I forgot about taking notes, savoring the spectacle in front of me and burning my throat with too-salty popcorn.

The little woman balled up her fists in front of her face, just like Dr. Dawes had done so many years ago and, to the amazement of everyone in the gym except her grown son beside her, invited Mean Mike to “come down ’ere and say that, you bastard!”

Was it fake? Real? It mattered not. This was Southern-style wrestling at its essence. And I, for one, knew that the only thing that would make this night more perfect would be a box of butter cookies to eat or, perhaps, to toss into the ring in disgust.

I heard that Mean Mike’s career ended shortly after that night, having had to choose between snapping necks and saving souls. He became a gospel singer with a band that played in the very same armories where he’d once called nice people’s grandmas toothless ol’ hags.

Only in the South, I thought. Happily.

For some weird reason, I’ve been getting lots of press releases lately from companies wanting me to use my newspaper column to promote “staycations,” sad little close-to-home trips designed to be gentle on your pocketbook. Laudable but dull as hell.

Camping is the ultimate family staycation, they say. Save money in this battered economy! Sleep under the stars and eat food from cans just like Boxcar Willie!

Clearly, the public relations folks at these companies don’t know me or they’d realize that sending me a story idea about how to, and I am not making this up, “cook on a mountainside in the worst conditions” is a huge mistake. The words “vacation” and “worst conditions” go together like Barack Obama and plaid flannel.

Then there was the “urgent media advisory” from the
makers of a handheld bug-repelling device that “efficiently repels black flies, mosquitoes, and no-see-um’s.” You know what else repels those insects? Hotel rooms. Big, sumptuous hotel rooms with windows that are sealed shut to prevent some dumbass from jumping and beds that don’t brag about having “a chest-high heat baffle and forehead comfort tube.” I refuse to take a vacation or staycation where, rather than contemplate the supreme joy that comes with an impossibly high thread count, I must fumble for a blow-up pillow that looks and smells like a kid’s swim ring. The camp bed boasts a “silken” lining. That’s right; just like a
casket.

Sure, who’d want a real vacation at some seaside cottage with panoramic views, plasma TVs, and nifty portable wine cellars in every room?

Why would I want that sort of comfort when I could embrace the great outdoors? With my trusty stainless-steel multitool, the absolute latest in versatile camping knickknacks, I can not only open a can of cold beef stew but also use the handy hook on one end to disembowel a bear.

Speaking of bears, one press release reminded campers to always hang all foodstuffs high in the trees so as not to tempt the wildlife. You know where wild animals won’t walk up and try to take your supper from you? Restaurants, that’s where. Think about it. When’s the last time you actually saw a hungry coyote strolling through the lobby at Ruth’s Chris? Plus, they’re probably too stupid to order the bread pudding once they get there. You know coyotes.

Another press release reminded me that staycationers should invest in a portable navigation system. These are especially useful for campers who can’t find their ass in the dark with both hands and a flashlight.

They’re waterproof, have a built-in compass, and are small enough to fit in your hand, conveniently leaving the other hand for waving good-bye to any hope of ever seeing your family again. I have a favorite navigation system, too. It’s called a
pilot.

Strolling hand in hand with the staycation movement is the green movement, but as Kermit said years ago, it ain’t easy being green.

A good friend sent me a very earnest e-mail asking our family to participate in something called “earth hour.” I did a double take when I read the hour that had been chosen for people to “not use any power, but rather spend the time changing out old non-Al Gore–sanctioned lightbulbs or brainstorming with family members on ways to reduce emissions and live more sustainably.”

God almighty, Saturday night ain’t what it used to be.

While the idea of “earth hour” is probably laudable, I had to wonder who in his right mind would plan a voluntary power blackout on the night of the NCAA regional finals. Sounded to me like someone had been smoking his eco-friendly hemp pillowcases. If they’d pulled the plug on my TV that night, I’d have left my carbon footprint up somebody’s behind.

It was hard enough trying to live through the TV writers’
strike, so I basically keep it on twenty-four/seven now just out of gratitude. Naturally, I took the side of the writers because, technically, I are one. They are my brethren and sisteren. And, yeah, I know that brethren isn’t a real word.

I can’t be asked to turn off the TV for any length of time, not even for the sake of the planet. What if I were to miss a “very special episode” of anything? During the writers’ strike, even the little TiVo icon who lives inside my TV and is normally so bouncy and happy looked as if he needed Zoloft.