Punks in the Beerlight
On the Dade County Youth Fair, my first kiss, and midget wrestling
As a way of getting in touch with my origins, every night I set the alarm clock for the time I was born, so that waking up becomes a historical reenactment
and the first thing I do is take a reading of the day and try to flow with it, like when you’re riding a mechanical bull and you strain to learn the pattern quickly so you don’t inadvertently resist it. ~ David Berman, “Self-Portait at 28”
Assigned black at birth
I can’t remember being born and no one else can remember it either, my parents and the doctor having passed away in the decades since, and my sister having been simultaneously too young and too mature in her narcissism by age 3. I don’t really remember much before I was 16 and could begin driving and operating with some modicum of independence, which I figure is when most people’s brains likely begin to boot up and delete the many unimportant hours of class, assemblies, recitals, small talk, and evening news broadcasts to make room for better, more interesting material. Most of my early years are smeared across the spatial realities and cubic constraints of my brain which is still functional, if a little retarded. Inside, other more important things slosh with abandon: my first broken bone, my first concert, the first time I learned I would never see someone again, my first drink.
Beyond accruing my firsts and learning the important functions mitochondria play, a few superlatives stand above all other memories. The worst is the sound of my wife in front of our sliding glass door, sucking in air as she sees a kitten we feed has caught its back paw between the slats of our fence and struggled to death overnight . When I want to remember the best, my wife is there again, legs digging into my hips as I carry her across a sea of drunks spread across cracks in the concrete.
I also remember things that were just good: my uncle teaching me how to play guitar, going to see action movies at the mall after getting geeked out on frozen coffee drinks, a birthday where my mom flew into town and made a huge dinner my friends ate in waves as they got to my apartment: roasted chicken, carrots, gravy, and mashed potatoes from scratch. But before each constituent frame in the highlight reel of life was recorded, there was my first breath when I emerged an innocent blob in a public hospital in Miami.
While I can’t remember being born, I can remember this: When my mother would tell the story, she would mention how fast I came out. If I recall, I was about two hours door-to-door, as they say and, even then, my father wasn’t able to stay awake or bother to come to the delivery room. He was almost 60 at this point and I was his fourth, and the last residues of attention had condensed and hardened on previous children. No matter, the nurses looked out. When he woke hours later, they ushered this sleepy Jewish man to the incubator where they proudly displayed a fresh black baby.
One night at the fair
As I’ve said, I barely remember the early years but, one thing I do remember was the Dade County Youth Fair. The fair was a monstrosity of old school America: mullets, livestock, corn dogs, cutoffs, corn on the cob, mustaches, cotton candy, funnel cake, sausage, peppers, headaches. It felt like 700 miles of blacktop on which you could call for air support if you got turned around. On any given night you could ride a rollercoaster, ask someone out, get beat up, puke, get fingered, win a prize, and do it again.
But all of this was just a few years after the disappearance of Adam Walsh from the Sears department store at the Hollywood Mall, which gave parents enough time to freak out about their kids getting abducted but not enough for society to react in any substantive way. Instead, the adults in the room supplied us with an American solution—use the television to have serious talks with your children, indemnifying them against the same dangers Hansel and Gretel faced back in the Black Forest. As a veteran of the BeforeTimes, who is intimately familiar with his gender and how to have consensual sex with a real live woman, I cannot validate this method enough. In addition to allowing parents to outsource the birds/bees convo, it yielded what eventually became a cohort of sexually viable adults later in life, The TV Method also yielded: America’s Most Wanted, a franchise for which I owe an entire life lived unchained to a radiator. Each week John Walsh presented the viewing public with evidence of children who had obviously died at the hands of well-meaning parents who had tried experimenting with old school heart-to-hearts. Thankfully, the show’s material abounded, wagon hitched to industrious criminals who ply their trade across bazaars far and wide.
Because I grew up in the time of low-status, trailer park pedophiles and not the high-status lizard people who run the US State Department, I was equally uninvolved in most activities that would have granted the nefarious access to my boyhood. Either way, my mom was taking no risks. She supplemented the TV’s guidance, telling me that, if anyone tried to touch my penis in the bathroom, I should pee on them, unleashing levels of corn syrup white Zoomers will never know. Contained in my dick was a power so profound, it could embarrass the most inveterate criminals, subjecting them to a barrage of taunts and an inevitable arrest, as they fled the scene Jordaches effectively tarred and feathered.
Back then, my half brother who is about 30 years older than me was still dating his now wife, who without giving too many details, is required to be attractive by profession, and he needed some baby bait to get her in the mood so they took me and my sister when we were way too young and kept us out way too late. While I have a few thoughts on my sister in-law in the present, when I think about her back then, I think how she was so vibrant and bubbly, smiling and laughing in the way that all women are when they are young and in love and on the town and can feel their stomach sink as they crest over the top of a rolling hill and you are young enough that they love you just for having baby blue eyes that should happen to look their particular way. In contrast, it is a way in which the best women are not distinct at all. It is required by life that they have this quality and that you spend the rest of your life chasing it. After you grow up, they don’t give it out for free.
During the 80’s and 90’s every boy from South Florida was issued three tasks: Don’t become Adam Walsh, Jimmy Ryce, or Elian Gonzalez. Very few of us survived.
Punks in the beerlight
My first girlfriend was Indian, kicking off a few decades of dating women from different races and cultures, with only a couple months-long stints with Jewish girls. This one was pretty, skinny, and smart. She went to another school and had not gotten the message I was a dork or else she was into dorks (also probable). In retrospect, an Ashkenazi guy with a Brahmin girl makes total sense, but we were different races and went to different schools and my parents probably saw it differently as there are very few Indian people in South Florida and there was no social script upon which to draw. She was light-skinned and looked like Princess Jasmine if she had been bleaching her skin for a decade. Later, I would date another Indian girl in New York who was so dark, silvery purple tones would burst through at night but things had changed by then and I knew Jewish girls were out of the question for me and no one in Brooklyn would do anything but clap for your bravery as civil rights activists if they saw you together anyway.
But, long before I was working in sales and drinking across a 7-year stretch of Brooklyn and receiving applause from random white women for dating their competition, there was the Dade County Youth Fair in ‘98. I can remember my mom valeting me and my friends in her silver Astro Van to meet up with this girl and one of her friends. At this point, my mom had agreed to lay back and let us do our thing although, knowing her, I suspect she had a sniper team phoning in our coordinates at all hours and that she herself was probably physically following us from about 1,000 feet away. If I recall, we had basically ended the date after a few hours and wound up at the front where my mom was. We made an excuse and walked back deeper into the park where I closed my eyes, bypassed her lips, and rammed straight into a pocket of chin diagonally below them, and then corrected course before peacing out. Even though my approach was off, we ironed out the kissing thing and ended up dating for a few months. Sometimes she would write to me about the maturity and depth of Dave Matthews’ lyrics. One day, before she could drive, she stole her parents car just to pick me up.
Suffering jukebox in a happy town
I was a chubby kid with bad skin who liked to read, which is code for didn’t-play-sports. Even though I am now a jacked guy with bad skin, I still hate Miami because you could legitimately get its citizens to vote in favor of a new favela before they would build a new library. Down there, no one reads except for a few Russian Jews in Golden Beach, who are ill-suited to fun and sun; there’s also a diaspora of old Cuban men who still dream of staging an armed revolution on the shores of Havana where no man has had such luck in quite some time. If you are a guy and you mainly like to talk about things or ideas rather than people, you are going to have a fairly boring life if you don’t crack a book (or Substack) and throw on a little YouTube now and then and it will still be boring if you have no one smart to talk to about it. The problem is that, in South Florida, to be intellectually curious is to stay conversationally unsatisfied, and to speak intellectually is to become unpopular. People are trying to tan and lift and do blow and work as real estate agents/club promoters/personal trainers/escorts. They are not trying to hear your nonsense about Westphalian nation states or the Protestant Reformation.
Having obviously learned my lesson, I now live in Texas, which apparently has many things in common with Florida. Chiefly, it is an equatorial gulf state populated by many borderers, Latin Americans, and black people, who are heavily armed, pro-business, and extremely martial in their honor culture. It is said that without the help of The Sunshine and Lone Star States, the US military would completely dry up, lacking a supply of sufficiently violent men of coachable disposition. And, while the effect may be slight, the people here in Texas are more intellectual than Floridians, a fact predicated on the fact that our beaches are mostly ugly and unconducive to twerking. South Florida, of course, contains many smart people who are in law, medicine, and finance, but very few of them are intellectually inclined past a New York Times Best-Seller about overcoming trauma through cooking. Even then, Texas is still nowhere near the intellectual firepower of New York or any other cold-weather, serious place where one might drink alone in silence like an adult, as opposed to on the beach between bluetooths.
Friday Night Fever
I never played any of the traditional sports like baseball or football other than a short-lived career in JV basketball before realizing I should just stick to music. While my friends played sports, I watched on the literal sidelines, playing in the understaffed pep band.
My school was small with my freshman class enlisting something like 110 students to start and, while most of the kids were obviously above average in intelligence with parents who possessed enough agency to afford five figures a head in 90’s bucks–only 69 of us would graduate, mostly owing to minor drug offenses, disciplinary issues, and kids transferring out to the few schools which were better or the many which were cheaper (public). This meant that almost every person on the football team played Offense, Defense, and Special Teams. This meant that I was basically the only male left to constitute the band. While the lineup was never permanent, other players included actual staff members, and a South American keyboardist who was obsessed with playing the hook from Van Halen’s “Jump” every chance he got. After rostering the football team and collecting a few of us for backup dancers, the only other guys who were really left had parents who were either progressive enough or in sufficient amounts of denial to indulge their sons’ predilections for figure-skating, keeping them far from the sweltering heat of the subtropical sun.
Because my school was small, they let me play electric guitar instead of more traditional instruments like tuba or sousaphone because guitar is loud and can fill in for multiple instruments at once. I wasn’t quite downgraded to the status of girl, which would have put me among the cheerleaders but, instead, got to be this secret third thing, which by now probably counts as nonbinary.
I would love to tell you that I got bullied and overcame it and that I have some kind of tragic memoir in my rearview but it just ain't so. I went to school with rich Jewish, South American, and WASP kids whose parents were lawyers, doctors, stock brokers, retailers, flower importers/drug-traffickers, oligarchs, and gun-runners, many of whom were extremely nice, civilized, polite, and well-educated. People who cared about being classy and putting on a good spread. On the other hand, many of their kids were snorting their parents’ Xanax and downing vodka before crashing shopping carts into light poles with the help of their Beamers. My friends weren’t those kids but we did hang out at their places and, while we were never tight, they never really fucked with me either, for which I’m grateful.
What I do remember about football was the excitement. Upper middle class white women wearing Ralph Lauren on the bleachers, some of them drinking spiked hot chocolate, cider, or just pulling the old vodka-in-Evian routine, and shouting for their sons to rip another kid’s face off for having the misfortune of attending a rival academic institution that might be closer to one’s home. One game, the team medic accidentally broke my friend, the quarterback’s, collarbone trying to put his shoulder back into place. Another time, I saw a rival team’s quarterback dip his shoulder as my friend tried to sack him. The QB flipped him over his shoulder without ever letting go of the ball and sent it sailing for a slant as he towered over my friend. In the same game, I watched one of our defensive linemen run a fumble back 98 yards before getting tackled just short of a touchdown. He was so fat and so fast, no one even cared he didn’t score.
Football was an occurrence for me, something you could set your calendar to, a bunch of games and keggers lined up from late August until just before Thanksgiving. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t on the field; it kind of hoovered you up whether you were male, female, or in the band and it didn’t matter what your role was.
Falcons of the Americas
Being an older, more mature gentleman, I find myself nostalgic for parts of my childhood despite disliking South Florida. I still play guitar. I still entertain ideas and book stuff no one cares about (when I’m actually reading), and I still like to get out and see something live as I am long past my Youth Fair days but still possess a wigger soul. As is my wont, last week, I went to two shows along with a midget wrestling match.
It’s true: The English have fox-hunting; the Saudis have falconry; and Americans have midget wrestling. To be fair, midget wrestling is much more like a Roman coliseum-type sport and a lot less like the other two which are based on keeping proles out rather than exploiting them for financial reasons. What’s cool about midget wrestling is tall peasants make the short ones do bloodsport. The result is a cross between The Puppy Bowl and Seder at Michael Vick’s house. Only we use humans.
I know people who have both gone to garden variety NFL games and the running of the bulls in Spain, who have taken umbrage at the sport and my attendance. All I can say is that they must want midgets to work the same shitty office jobs they themselves are always escaping, figuring out how to bring more of their work hours into their actual home lest they miss an episode of their favorite series. I hate to break it to people but these guys have groupies and, to ask them to give this up, is kind of like telling them you can fix the problem of getting laid and having an interesting life if only they would just wear a suit and sit at a desk.
The way it works is there are a handful of federations within the U.S. that tour the many great and productive cities that make America such a rich, enterprising nation. They set the wrestling ring and folding chairs in the middle of a parking lot or the backyard of a bar. Then they feed the midgets painkillers so that they are cheery enough to talk shit and run into each other at painful but moderate speeds. Some are jacked and do real lucha libre moves, high-diving off the top rope while sinking their enemy further into the ring. Some are old and would probably enjoy not having to spend their golden years being driven like a light pole into a shockingly buoyant and resilient floor. While some of the older athletes are more reserved in their intensity, they compensate by turning up the drama and instigating the crowd by verbally attacking locals with the acerbic wit for which the people of Arkansas are so famous. Occasionally, you will be blessed with a competitor from far off, exotic destinations like the SouthSide of Boston. Sometimes, it’s just some Polish broad pile-driving her snatch into a tiny guy’s face. The capacity for adventure and melodrama remains expansive in the fast-paced sport of midget wrestling. What any given night holds is anyone’s guess.
When random rules
Four months ago I shattered the outside of my foot and broke the top of it, which is how I ended up here on Substack, talking to losers and weirdos and big-brained professionals pretending they’re any different, but I’m here in the future where my foot is doing a little better. Turns out I never got chopped up inside a guy’s trailer, I still like bloodsport, and I swept my wife off her feet for the first time in months yesterday. No one can remember but, in 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.
Parsis aren't brahmins though.
Fantastic