Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part II

Partin Reign May be Short-Lived

Edward G. Partin, start witness in the trial of Jimmy Hoffa, is now reigning supreme over the Teamsters in central Louisiana.

‘I’m not going to have Partin and a bunch of hoodlums running this state,’ Gov. McKeithen told us. ‘We have no problems with law-abiding labor. But when gangsters raid a construction project and shoot men up at work I’m going to do something about it.’

‘Partin has two Justice Department guards with him for fear Hoffa will retaliate against him,’ Gov. McKeithen said, ‘This gives him immunity.’

The governor referred to an incident in Plaquemine when 45 to 50 men shot up 30 workers of the W.O. Bergeron Construction Co.

‘Baton Rouge has never has such a siege of labor violence as it’s seen since Partin came back from the Chattanooga trial with two Justice Department guards to protect him.’

New Orleans State Times, 27 January 1968

On the morning of 03 August 1989 I walked out of the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District courthouse with Judge Bob’s signature on my emancipation paperwork. The piece of paper and all the privileges it would provide only had one sentence typed in black font, but it was longer than a legal sized paper and looked almost comical with a few letters on it like the sprinkling of pimples on a kid’s face the first few weeks of puberty. A court secretary gave me a legal sized envelope on my way out, and I carried both to meet Lea, who was waiting for me in her dad’s work van.

I plopped into the passenger seat and held up my emancipation paperwork and the envelope and grinned, flashing the braces across my teeth.

“It’s a legal piece of paper that doesn’t fit in a legal sized envelop,” I said.

She laughed and I folded the paper to fit into the envelop. She started the van and pushed a cassette into her tape deck and handed me the case.

She lit a cigarette and asked, “Have you heard of this yet?”

I hadn’t.

“Guns and Roses is my new favorite,” she said as she pushed play.

The tape was called Appetite for Destruction. It was a legitimate copy, not one of the bootlegs a lot of us bought from a strip mall near Belaire nicknamed Little Saigon. The cover had original artwork, not a bad Zerox from the Little Saigon print center, and it was an ornate cross with a skull wearing a hat at each corner. One skull wore a magician’s top hat, which I’d later learn was Slash, the lead guitarists. Their album was one of the country’s best selling and had been out since 1987, but popular trends were sometimes slow to reach all the way down to Baton Rouge. We all knew Motley Crue and Ratt and other bands with enviable mullets that came from the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, but Guns-N-Roses was new to me.

Lea rolled down her window to let out smoke and turned up the volume, and for the first time I heard Axl Rose’s wailing voice leading into Welcome to The Jungle and Slash’s guitar riffs ramping up to meet him. She put the van in gear and we left the courthouse and rocked out on the way to the recruiter’s office on Government Bulevard. It was so close to the courthouse that Lea didn’t finish her cigarette and Axl was only partially through It’s so Easy when she parked and I walked into the recruiters office.

He was surpised to see me again. He was an E6 with what I now recognize as Vietnam service campaign medals but without combat infantry badge or airborne wings or an air assault badge or anything I’d later associate with combat. He was slightly overweight and was sitting behind a cheap desk adorned with fliers advertising the latest recruitment campaign. Their slogan was, I felt, hooky: “Be All You Can Be.” A slogan like that could have only been contrived by someone who didn’t wrestle.

I had been at the recruiter’s office a month before, when Uncle Bob was still sick but unquestionably dying, and the recruiter told me I needed my parents signature to join the army. He was from another state and didn’t recognize my name, and when I explained my situation he suggested getting emancipated. He probably thought that would be the end of hearing from me, yet there I was with a legal envelop bulging with the folded emancipation proclamation from Judge Bob.

I handed the recruiter my emancipation proclamation. He unfolded it and looked up at me from behind his desk. I pointed out the raised seal and signature. He said he had seen one before, and we began the process of me joining the army at age 16. If I graduated high school, he said, I would take a bus to New Orleans to join other recruits, then those bound for infantry would take another bus to Fort Benning, Georgia, where we would swear to uphold the United States constitution and begin basic training. I did the required ten pushups one-handed, mostly to show off but partially to take advantage of every opportunity to prepare for my senior year and final season year of wrestling.

Lea and I left the recruiter’s office and finished listening to Appetite for Destruction on the way to my orthodontists. I had set up an afternoon appointment to have my braces removed even though I was supposed to wear them at least another year. When he asked what my mom would say about that, I unfolded my paperwork and held it up like an FBI agent flashing a badge. He said okay, and two hours later I was free from braces. He fit me for a retainer and said it would be ready in a few weeks. I hopped back in Lea’s van, and we headed towards the levee to watch the sun set while I practiced smiling and talking with smooth teeth for the first time in three years.

Lea was prone to dramatize things. Her nickname was Princess Lea, like the character in Star Wars. She dressed as slave-Lea from Return of The Jedi for Halloween the year before, and that’s when she taught me about The Hero’s Journey plot structure George Lucas used in Star Wars. She said I was on that journey, and that Coach was my Yoda. She was about to start Southeastern University and study theater and literature, and to her everything was a metaphor. She said removing my braces was symbolic of removing the shackles of my family. I disagreed. I said it was harder to breath when wearing a mouth guard. She liked her version better, and said one day I’d see it her way. I said I saw the metaphor but it wasn’t true, but that I was anxious to try out my lips’s freedom, and that was no metaphor.

We parked along the levee in front of the old old state capital, a building built like a three-story castle and perched on the tallest hill in Baton Rouge, a forty foot mound of dirt overlooking the Mississippi levee that’s only a hundred yards from the new capital. We hiked up the hill and sat under the sprawling moss covered branches of an old stately oak tree, took deep breaths, and sighed peaceful sighs.

She had a small hardshell Igloo cooler with a six pack of Milwaukee’s Best she had bought to celebrate, more for the joke of calling it Milwaukee’s Beast than anything special, but I had stopped drinking the year before to focus on wrestling. She knew that, she just liked beer and had recently turned 18 and enjoyed flashing her ID to buy it. She brought a Coke for me, but I told her I had given up sugar, too. I sipped water from my dad’s old boy scout canteen that I carried to reduce the temptation to drink sugary things.

As she sipped her Beast, I explained the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates, which I had just read about in one of Coach’s training magazines. She listened, not because she was interested in carbohydrates, but because I was in a good mood and chatty and she had planned on letting me have a day where I could be free, metaphorically speaking.

I had always felt at peace sitting on the mild slope of the old state capital and I still do. In his autobiography, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain called our old state capital the worse eyesore on the Mississippi River; but, most people I knew adored it. To us, it was our cherished castle on a hill. Like you could see from the state capital, all of southern Louisiana is flat; many parts near the river are a foot or two below sea level, as if the only place to slide down something was into a muddy ditch beside the levy. It rarely snows in Baton Rouge, but as kids we would pretends we were snow sledding down a mountain by sitting on pieces of cardboard boxes and sliding down the 30 or 40 feet of grass hill in front of the castle. It was – and is – a Baton Rouge icon though much less revered than the Kingfish’s Tiger Stadium and new state capital.

I don’t know what Mark Twain would say if he saw the billowing smoke stacks of petrochemical plants called Chemical Alley a few miles downriver from the two capital buildings, but I grew up knowing nothing else and didn’t notice them and I only saw the old castle and the new capital and the Mighty Mississippi River with all of its barges passing under the bridge. That day was Lea’s gift to me: a moment to sit in on that hill and process all that had happened on my first day as an adult. To be free in mind and body, and by all laws of Louisiana. I could join the army, drop out of school, flee to Mexico or Canada. I could do whatever I chose, and she wanted me to take a moment and appreciate that freedom.

Lea finished her beer and another cigarette, and we found a giant old stately oak tree with enough gnarled branches to get privacy from the few people walking by on a weekday afternoon. She was a snuggler after a few beers, and I cradled her and we chatted with our faces only a few inches apart.

“Coach gave us marriage advice,” I said, practicing talking without braces; I had to concentrate on not spraying spittle while I talked with loose lips.

Lea raised a dark eyebrow over her narrow eye. She was a quarter Japanese on her mother’s side and had slightly narrow eyes because of that, but she had her dad’s thick eyebrows. Her parents met when her dad returned from Vietnam and out-processed in San Diego’s navy base, where Lea’s mom lived with her parents in the Asian district off Convoy street; during WWII, they had been forced to live in remote southern California Manzanar detention camp during the horrific detainment of around 250,000 Japanese-Americans. Lea’s parents returned to Baton Rouge and adapted to local culture, but she mostly she kept to herself and never integrated with the strong southern Catholic culture. She said she had learned from her parents to be wary of neighbors who don’t accept who you are. When Lea and I spoke about the future, we often spoke of growing up with atypical home lives and learning how to keep secrets from classmates.

I held up my finger the way Coach did when he was saying something important, and said:

“He held up his finger and said…”

I changed my voice to mimic his raspy midwestern accent, slowed my speech, then continued:

“Gentlemen. The secret to a happy marriage is: no matter what type of day you had, the first thing you do when you get home is kiss your wife on the cheek, and ask her how her day was.”

Lea cocked her head as if expecting more.

“Why’d he say that?” she asked.

I lowered my finger and shrugged that I wasn’t sure.

“He was in a good mood all day,” I said. “I think it’s his anniversary this week or something like that. He was smiling like a kid in a candy store all day. I think he and Mrs. K had a date night.”

“Hmm,” she said. “That must be nice.”

Not all of Coach’s advice applied to everyone. To us, asking how someone’s day was would be the most invasive thing you could do. Though I was still mid-pubescent, for almost a year we had been fooling around and I ejaculated a bit, but none of her friends knew the details or that I had scraggly public hair. I never told anyone her mother was Japanese, or that Lea spent three years in middle school being molested by her uncle on weekends; her father never knew, either. We trusted each other to say what was important to us, and we never pried into what happened when we were not together.

Only a few of our mutual friends knew Lea’s background. Other kids in school said she looked exotic, like Angelina Jolie or other actresses who bucked the mainstream blonde good looks of the 80’s. Most people assumed she was Creole, the darker skinned people mostly from near New Orleans who were a mix of white French, olive skinned Spanish, and black African Americans. (The French and Spanish kept swapping ownership of Louisiana and the slaves, but Spain sent their aristocratic males without wives accompanying them; hence, Creoles with dark skin and a mixture of backgrounds that overlaps with the Cajuns, who came from Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, where Uncle Bob had been born.) Creole was seen as a badge of honor, a new race unique to southern Louisiana, and my reputation was buoyed by dating a gorgeous Creole who had a driver’s license and could buy beer.

“We had a bunch of kids from Belaire Middle over,” I said. “Some from the shows I did. I was showing them some basics and invited a few guys from the team to meet us. Andy and Timmy showed up. They hadn’t found jobs yet, and told us how any of us could earn a living.”

Lea raised an eyebrow to show she was interested; all of us getting older wanted to know how we’d be free from the time cards and hourly wages that dominated Baton Rouge’s options.

I changed back to my midwestern accent, held up my forefinger, and said: “Pig Farming.”

Both of her eyebrows went up in a mix of confusion or curiosity.

“Pig farming,” I repeated, just like Coach had. It had pricked our curiosity, too.

“They don’t need a lot of attention,” I said, still using a poor impersonation of Coach’s accent. “But if you treat them well, you’ll be happy in life.”

We mulled that over silently for a while.

Eventually, she smiled and said: “They’re just like me.”

We chuckled and snuggled closer.

With her face pressed beside mine, we stared between the leaves at the barges floating up and down the river, and she said, “Tell Andy and Timmy I said hi. I won’t see them at Todd’s before school starts up in two weeks.”

I mumbled that I would, and we both sighed peacefully and watched barges float down the river in no hurry to be anywhere else.

Lea and I had shared everything about our families, more for clarity and the coincidental overlap of our lives than gossip. Like half of Baton Rouge, her dad worked for Big Daddy at some point in their lives. She grew up hearing of her dad’s exploits stealing building materials from construction sites all over the southeast, keeping parts of orders in the back of his 18 wheeler and brining them to Baton Rouge, where Big Daddy used them to build a NASCAR racetrack called the Baton Rouge International Speedway. It was later renamed The Pelican Speedway, and Big Daddy gave away tickets to pack the stands when investors showed up; they assumed the stands filled at $10 a seat, and they paid the owner on legal paperwork – another Teamster in Local #5 – a large but unknown sum of money for the race track and stands. It soon went bankrupt and was demolished to make way for a hospital, but by then all the Teamsters involved were paid well and no one spoke of the theft or deceit. We grew up in families who knew how to keep secrets, which led us to being transparent with each other.

After sunset, Lea and I found an oak tree with exceptionally dense branches undulating across the ground that made a nook inside, fooled around, and went home to her family for take-out pizza dinner. Her parents had always been fine with me staying in her room. “Any grandson of Edward Partin is welcome in my home,” her dad told me with a grin that implied he hoped to be my father in law and related to Big Daddy one day.

That night, I thanked Princess Lea for a glorious day. It wasn’t as eventful of a day as Ferris Bueller’s Day off, I said, but I bet it was the best first day as an adult any 16 year old had ever had. If Mark Twain had days like ours, I said, maybe he would have appreciated the old state capital more. We snuggled the rest of the night.

The next two weeks was just as blissful. But all good things come to an end, and Lea left for college in late August and rented an apartment in Hammond. Her dad offered me to stay in her room for my senior year. But Lea’s family lived too far from Belaire to attend practice practically, so at the end of August I moved in with Todd’s family, who lived three miles from away. I could jog to and from practice.

Todd was Todd Abrams, son of Lea’s former fifth grade math teacher, Mrs. Barbee Abrams, and president of the Red Stick Flingers, a knife-throwing club Todd ran in Abrams’ back yard. He and Lea had known each other since the fifth grade, and though he went to Belaire and she went to Scotlandville Magnet all the way north of Chemical Alley, they saw each other weekly in groups like in the Flingers, Renassaance Fairs, and at a downtown Ku-Kempo dojo.

The Abrams were an all-American family. Mr. Abrams led a local boy scout troup and was a HAM radio enthusiasts with a 3-story antenna behind their garage that he would sometimes show us and let us speak with people all over the world. Todd was a junior at Belaire and star of theater, drummer in the Bengal marching band, and state martial arts champion. Ben Abrams was a senior at Belaire, honor student, baseball letterman, trumpet player in the Bengal marching band, and former wrestler who had introduced me to Coach in the 10th grade. Our mutual friends, the twins Timmy and Andy, were neighbors who had graduated the year before and threw tomahawks with the Red Stick Flingers. Lea trained with all of them at Todd’s dojo and sparing events he held in the Abrams’s back yard in a spot next to their HAM radio tower were we had wheeled in a massive wooden spool that had held power cables at a construction site; it was ideal target to impale with knives and tomahawks.

Though Lea smoked, she was active and flexible and could kick Todd’s face just as easily as his crotch, and she never telegraphed which it would be. I started joining them the summer before as a way to improve wrestling throws, and the Abrams treated all of us like family. Todd and his group were some of the few people I told about Big Daddy. He was a heavyweight boxer in his youth, until he broke his right hand punching someone in the face with his bare hand when he was 21, and he had taught me how to use my long arms to throw a punch, saying that in a real fight without gloves you’re likely to break your hand so that’s when you use a knife or gun instead. They all knew Big Daddy, or had seen him in the news and heard the stories, and tidbits like that buoyed my reputation almost as much as dating Lea had.

She planned to visit Todd’s house on weekends, and I couldn’t imagine a better family to join for my final year of high school. It was the end of summer, with long days of sunlight and hot, muggy weather that beckoned days of leisure. and I had a few weeks of nothing to do but enjoy time with people I loved. In the end, that’s all Uncle Bob would have wanted.

I started my senior year fall of 1989, 16 years old but a legal adult. I kept it a secret. The only people who knew were Judge Bob, my mom, the recruiter, the Abrams, and Lea’s family. I was unsure if it would affect my sports eligibility, so I asked them to keep it a secret, too. and that was easy because we were all people who kept our family lives private. I said I wanted to focus on training to become the best wrestler I could, and the deep truth behind that oozed from me whenever I spoke about plans for my senior year.

I already knew from wrestling that the army recruitment slogan was possible without needing to join anything, I could do it on my own if I asked a few friends for help. No movie taught me that; friends were there when family was not. I told Mrs. Abrams that, and she gave me a small paperback book published that year by the poet and minister, Hugh Prather, “Notes on Love and Courage,” and pointed to one of the notes on friendship. I memorized it that week, and can type it from memory 40 years later:

Interests change. Friendship based on mutual interests in doomed. Real friendship is an unshakable faith in what was once truly seen, no matter how recently or long ago.

Our group of friends saw the power of unity and not prying into things not useful at the moment. The army would just help me get out of Louisiana and not take a job with my family. It was a method, not a goal. I didn’t know what the goal was yet, but I knew that no matter the goal the first two steps would be emancipating myself and leaving Louisiana. I knew I’d always have a family to fall back on if necessary, and that gave me more freedom than any piece of paper could.

To honor my army contract, I needed to finish my senior year. I had a family in the Abrams’s back yard that summer and a team at Belaire waiting for me when school began. In a year, the 82nd would be my next team. Despite what the pudgy recruiter said, I felt that anyone who needed a team’s uniform to be their best didn’t get the point of wrestling. They had they seen self-motivated teams at the downtown all-city camp, nor had they ran down Government Street and seen the Union soldier bullet holes in churches or run up the state capital steps and paid attention to the Confederate uniforms hanging in the old war school museum; if they had, maybe they would have seen that not everyone who wears a uniform does the right thing. And if they had ran up and down the state capital steps as many times as Hillary and I had, keeping going even when your body begged for you to stop, they would have known that only you can make yourself be all you can be.

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