Meeting Hillary the first time

“Here, Edward Partin, a jailbird languishing in a Louisiana jail under indictments for such state and federal crimes as embezzlement, kidnapping, and manslaughter (and soon to be charged with perjury and assault), contacted federal authorities and told them he was willing to become, and would be useful as, an informer against Hoffa, who was then about to be tried in the Test Fleet case.

“A motive for his doing this is immediately apparent — namely, his strong desire to work his way out of jail and out of his various legal entanglements with the State and Federal Governments. And it is interesting to note that, if this was his motive, he has been uniquely successful in satisfying it. In the four years since he first volunteered to be an informer against Hoffa he has not been prosecuted on any of the serious federal charges for which he was at that time jailed, and the state charges have apparently vanished into thin air.“

Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States, 1966

I saw Hillary Clinton for the first time on a Wednesday evening in mid-November of 1989, when the Baton Rouge air had finally cooled and the days were short.

One of the reasons Jimmy Hoffa mentioned shooting Kennedy with a sniper rifle as he rode around a southern town in his convertible is that in the south, you can ride a convertible on a sunny November day, like the one on November 22nd, 1963, when President Kennedy was shot and killed by at least one sniper rifle as he rode through downtown Dallas in an open convertible.

This story isn’t about that, but it’s related, because my grandfather was famous for sending Hoffa to prison, and lesser known for training Lee Harvey Oslwad, the New Orleans native whose was at least partially responsible for Kennedy’s death. It all happened before my time, but because my family was involved, whenever I remember wrestling Hillary Clinton, I find myself back in time and in Baton Rouge, on a sunny November afternoon, before I knew my grandfather’s part in history.

School let out and the Belaire Bengal wrestling team was loading up in Belaire’s big blue Chevy passenger van. Coach was behind the wheel, waiting for 15 of us to squeeze into the van. We were headed to Capital High School for our first dual meet of the 1989-1990 season. I was standing outside the van with my hand on the sliding door, waiting for our van to fill up.

Beside us was an Astro minivan. It was filled with seven Bengals and driven by Big-Head Ben Abrams, an 18 year old, third-year 189 pounder, a Bengal baseball star and enthusiastic but only average wrestler who, to this day, insists his nickname was just Big Ben, like the clock in London. He had introduced me to wrestling in 1987, and his mom had driven me and other wrestlers to practice. When his dad’s cancer laid him up at home, Mrs. Abrams put Ben in driver’s education class at Belaire and he had been driving us around in his dad’s Astrovan since. We planned on driving that van to Canada and back after graduating high school in a few more months; when we returned, Ben planned to stay in Baton Rouge and attend Louisiana State University to become a math teacher, like his mother. He would succeed, and in 2009 would be named Houston’s Teacher of The Year. I planned to leave Louisiana for the army’s 82nd Airborne division, with quick pit stops in basic training, advanced infantry training, and airborne school.

Ben’s little brother, Todd “Mace” Abrams, was in the passenger seat. He was Belaire’s theater star, a 16 year old, first-year 164 pounder and the state martial arts champion specializing in Ku Kempo; he planned to graduate and go to Hollywood to become a stuntman and actor and professional knife thrower. He was a mediocre wrestler. Todd suffered from asthma, and he’d quit the team later that day after a humiliating defeat. He’d return to the theater department and focus all of his attention there, bragging about how many girls he bedded because he was the only straight guy in theater. Mr. Abrams was a homosexual who had cheated on his mom; only a few of us knew that he didn’t really have cancer, he had AIDS, and was dying at home. Todd obviously had something to prove.

Before his dad admitted to having AIDS a year earlier, Todd would have us and a bunch of other people over for the Red Stick Flingers, a knife and axe throwing club. Todd liked to get out of the house as often as he could to blow off steam; had it not been for his asthma, he would have made a fine wrestler. He ended up in Hollywood under the name Jack Dagger, after his grandfather, Jack Bennet, as a world champion knife thrower listed in the Guiness Book of World Records for speed-throwing, and with a list of television and film credentials for knife flinging, including being the stunt-double hands spinning barber shop shears for Adam Sandler’s comedy film about an Israel special operations soldier who quits and moves to Hollywood to pursue his lifelong dream of being a hair dresser. (You can spot the difference in their hands because Adam’s hands were not that hairy; Todd’s always were, and no one thought to shave them before filming.)

In the seat behind Todd was Steve “The Long Express” Long, Ben’s neighbor and friend since childhood, a senior and our 171 pounder who was what people called a corn-fed country boy, short on technique but strong enough to heft a big-antlered deer over his shoulder after gutting it. He usually won by brute force, but always reached down and offered a hand up to the stunned loser. He was the great-nephew of Louisiana governor’s Huey “Kingfish” Long and Earl “Uncle Earl” Long, made famous in a few films for their escapades, like when Paul Newman played Uncle Earl in Blaze, a popular film about Governor Earl Long’s relationship with the New Orleans stripper named Blaze, and showing him tackling a state legislator and biting his ear off in a heated budget debate. Uncle Earl was committed to an insane asylum after that, but because he was still governor he was able to sign the pardon slipped under his padded door and complete his term.

In terms of notoriety, Steve’s family history rivaled mine, though his current family was remarkably unremarkable, spending time hunting and fishing and cooking big pots of gumbo for the neighborhood. Steve planned on joining Ben and me on our cross country trip, but he had no idea what he’d do after. He was a Boggart buff, and he’d quip that he doesn’t plan that far in the future, it’s all in God’s hands. He’d end up exactly like you’d imagine, and I everyone I know, including his parents, are proud. To this day, one of my proudest moments was the first time I pinned The Long Express, a fierce fighter who outweighed me by at least thirty pounds, only days before he and the rest of the team surprised me by voting me co-captain at the end of last season.

Todd and Ben saluted me to say they were ready.

I nodded back, turned my gaze back to the final two Bengals squeezing into our van. I was co-captain of the Belaire High School wrestling team, known throughout southern Louisiana as the Belaire High Bengals. I was known as Magik, with a k, to to be confused with Magic Johnson, with a c, the big guy who had aides, or The Orlando Magic, also with a c, which had just been formed and stole LSU’s famed Shaqueele O’Neal, who wore a custom made size 26 basketball shoe the size of a small canoe. The van was filled by some kids who would quit over the next few months and whose names I don’t recall; the first guy in, who always sat in the back, was Miasha Webb, our 152 pounder and a person so bouncy and positive and energetic that a few of us tried to get the nickname Tiger, pronounced Tig-er, like the character in Winnie The Pooh, but spelled like Tiger, like the LSU Fighting Tigers.

I stood by our big van as the final two Bengals squeezed in. Michael “Captain” Thompson, our 135 pounder, a junior, and Belaire’s Junior ROTC captain, slapped my shoulder as he hopped into the front bucket seat. I can never remember what ROTC stands for, but a lot of us always joked that it meant people who chose to wear uniforms and be told what to do while marching up and down the football field for no apparent reason.

Michael’s dad was a special forces captain in President Kennedy’s Vietnam, when Kennedy had wanted to keep the conflict to under 50,000 special operations soldiers who would train the Vietnamese. After Kenendy was killed, Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration ramped up the conflict to include 560,000 Americans at any given time for the next twelve years, most drafted when they weren’t in college, leading to a conflict with an average age of 19 years old and a remarkable number of lower income African Americans being given the choice of going to Vietnam to be shot, going to jail in America, or fleeing their home and hiding in Canada or Mexico at the exact same time U.S. National Guardsmen were spraying Martin Luther King Junior and his supporters with fire hoses, sicking police dogs on them, and standing beside Governor George Wallace and between young African American girls and the open door to The University of Alabama. (The draft wouldn’t be banned until a few years of progressively stronger phrasing in laws beginning after Vietnam officially ended in 1975 until some time around President Carter’s administration in 1976 to 1979). His dad never stopped by school, and never offered his opinion to anyone including the ROTC faculty.

Michael said a wrestling team loading into vans was akin to loading a small team onto a helicopter or armored assault vehicle. He said his dad said no one saluted in real-world combat, at least in special forces; to do so was a joke, a “sniper check” to see if anyone was paying attention to whomever thought they were in charge.

Though not talking about it, Michael was tired and hungry; he had to cut three pounds the night before to make 135, and he hadn’t eaten in two days. I’m not making that last sentence up; Michael would follow in his father’s footsteps, and we’d both know fatigue and hunger in a few simulated concentration camps, Ranger school selection, Delta selection, and an aborted mission deep inside a sweltering Latin American Caribbean island for three days with everyone having at least one broken bone each; in more than 40 years, I never once heard Michael complain. His dad was like that, too. I never learned what happened to his mother.

Dana “Big D” Miles, our big-bellied 275 heavyweight and a senior who was also the football team’s linebacker, squeezed in beside Michael. He didn’t call himself Big D, he said he was Lil’ Fila Ice-D T, spelled as if he had swallowed every popular rapper’s name, chewed them up, and spit them out in a rhythmic rhyme. He’d end up raising a family as big as him, and would spend a lifetime volunteering for Baton Rouge wrestling, football, and softball programs.

I was no longer Jason Partin: I was Magik with a Capital K.

I had tried Magic Ian, a pun I used on my business card to make it use my middle name and look like magician, but Big D told me that sounded too white and – I’m not making this up – I was too cool to sound like anything else, so I should call myself Magik with a Capital K. Everyone else called me Magik; even the wrestling scoreboards at dual meets spelled out “Magik: Belaire” in big neon lights. This year, they’d also spell out my name for entire weekends packed with fans and high school girls, but it would say “Belaire: co-captains Jeremymagik.

Once a weekend, almost every weekend that season including the weekend Hillary broke my finger, everyone in the stadiums thought the neon light girls were playing a prank on Jeremy. That’s probably what Robin felt like around Batman, or how any vice president of the United States feels when no one recognizes them in public.

Jeremy was in the front seat. He’d end up moving back home and raising a lovely family, but I wouldn’t know that until more than 30 years after our graduation six months later. On that November day, I still knew practically nothing about Belaire’s other co-captain, other than he always sat next to Coach.

I shoved my backpack full of extra clothes, a deck of cards, and a coin purse full of five Kennedy half dollars from the 1970’s and two old English pennies that were just as big into the floorboard. I smirked and stared at Big D until he wiggled over and squished Michael against his window.

I leaned against D and heaved the van’s sliding door shut. My right arm was pinned against the window. Michael groaned in mock pain and exaggerated how much he had to squish against the window, and Big D patted his bulging belly and laughed loudly. He was still wearing a big black plastic trash bag under his hoodie. He had skipped his final class to jog around the gym for an hour to sweat off a few more pounds, but was still on the cusp of 275 pounds and needed to loose at least two ounces on the ride. He had an empty 16 ounce Gatorade bottle in his lap to spit into on the ride.

In his backpack, D carried a few schoolbooks, a large Tupperware container full of sandwiches, a lunchbox size bag of Zapps potato chips, and two unopened bottles of Gatorade for after weigh-in. Michael’s backpack was full of school books because he was shooting for an academic scholarship to West Point military academy, like his dad had earned. Michael usually studied in the bleachers during meets and tournaments, and in a few weeks I’d start joining him to study quietly on overnight trips to tournaments in northern Louisiana. I never learned why Big D carried school books to meets. After graduating, he planned on going to Southern University, an all African American university about 45 minutes outside of Baton Rouge, but he didn’t know why. He’d complete a degree, but I never asked what it said.

Coach, a 54 year old man about Michael’s size, was in the driver’s seat with his head towards us and his seat pulled all the way forward to accommodate D. He chuckled at our banter, but didn’t say a word. When he spoke, Coach called Dana Mr. D, Michael either Captain or Michael, depending on if other ROTC kids were around, and me Magik. His wispy white hair barely poked above the driver’s seat.

The Bengal’s other co-captain was, as I may have mentioned, in the front passenger seat next to coach. He wore a stoic countenance that bordered on an annoyed scowl. He was a terse 140 pounder, and our returning 135 pound state silver medalist, but had grown over the summer and weighed around 143 pounds. He had been brutally beaten by Hillary Clinton the year before, when they both wrestled at 135.

Jeremy had been captain for two years until the team voted us co-captains in March of 1989. When the slips of paper were collected and tallied, Coach stared at his clipboard, scribbled his pencil on the pad for a bit to re-do the math. He used a ranked voting system, the type coaches use to choose the all-state wrestler, or most valuable player, or all of those systems were no matter who is the winner, they were on everyone’s top five list, and almost always top two in competitive sports with a fair playing field. It’s how his olympic coach had done things, and probably how a lot of coaches allow teams to make decisions.

Coach looked up and down his clipboard for at least twenty seconds, took off the reading glasses he always had dangling from his neck, and said: “Hmph. Never saw that before. So be it.”

It turns out that I had ranked Jeremy first, Michael second, Big D third, the twins Andy and Timmy fourth and fifth; Jeremy had only listed himself five times. It worked out for the best, because the twins turned 16 and dropped out of school over the summer and were in some place for kids who had nervous breakdowns, so they couldn’t have been co-captains that year, anyway.

Jeremy’s long lanky legs folded atop the glovebox so that he could lean his backrest forward. He never carried a backpack, and he grew up used to feeling hungry for a few days before a match and therefore never spoke about it. He never served in the military, at least that I heard of. Coach called him Jeremy. He had dropped weight to avoid wrestling Hillary Clinton at 145 pounds, and had pinned me in less than two minutes the day before to take Belaire’s 140 spot, the one I had won from Michael only minutes before and knocked him down to 135.

Though Miasha still denies it, I also defeated him for the 152 spot, but that would have upset the team’s odds of winning the dual meet, so I let Miahsa remain in 152 and thought I’d wrestle at 145 and see how things went. Hillary had devastated Jeremy the year before, but I didn’t see that match and wouldn’t waste energy speculating on how I’d do; I had upset better wrestlers before, and as Coach always said, someone has to win, and it might as well be you. Just wrestle.

Coach rotated his squat, acorn-shaped head towards the back of our van with what was, for him, a serious expression. His pale blue eyes sparkled with a smile even when his face did not. His lips moved subtly as he silently counted us to make sure there were 15 Bengals inside.

Coach knew how to lead a team. He had been a marine reservist during the Korean conflict, though he never went overseas until he wrestled with the U.S. After he returned from the olympics, he started teams in rural Iowa middle schools and was assistant wrestling coach at Iowa under what was a legendary head coach. In 168 LSU recruited him to start LSU’s wrestling program and he was asked to make them a world-class team. Within a few years, LSU was ranked 4th in the nation, defeating even Iowa in dual meets, and had produced a few All American wrestlers. In 1979 the federal government passed the Title IV law, which required all public universities to have equal numbers of males and females in sports, and LSU’s all-male wrestling team was eliminated, just like around 100 wrestling teams nationally, and probably just as many male gymnastics and boxing teams. USA Wrestling named him Wrestler of The Year, and in his 2014 eulogy an entire nation of athletes would pay their respects on online forums, including the team I’ve mentioned so far.

To keep his family in Baton Rouge and his kids in the same schools as their friends, Coach took a job as Belaire’s driver’s education teacher and assistant football coach. Later that year, he started Belaire’s wresting team with his youngest son, Craig, as the only wrestler, and Craig became Belaire’s first state champion in 1983. I joined the team in November of 1987, soon after my father began his sentence in an Arkansas penitentiary, and two days after Big Daddy was back home after being released from his kush Texas penatenrary cell.

My grandfather was released early for declining health, reported by newspapers as him having diabetes and an unspecific heart condition, which was a common condition of people paroled early because they no longer served a purpose in prison; he’d live three years longer and die a week after Hillary Clinton breaks my finger in four months. Talking about him now is to introduce Coach Dale Ketelesen and emphasize the role he had in my nature versus nurture at a time where everyone else only wanted to ask about either my grades or my grandfather, and I didn’t want to discuss either.

Coach turned the key, and the van’s eight cylinders rumbled to life and shook everyone inside. He lowered the gear shift, and we pulled out of the gym’s parking lot. He asked if Ben were following, and I looked back and told him yes.

Jeremy pulled his Belaire-blue hoodie over his head, reclined his backrest, and stared into the front windshield. I folded my knees onto the back of his seat like Jeremy folded his legs against the glovebox. My seat wouldn’t recline.

We turned onto Tams Drive towards the Little Saigon shopping mall, and turned right along Florida Boulevard. It was a long road jammed with traffic lights, strip malls, and po’boy shops. We opened the windows a bit to let out the smell of a few guys who had sweat all day to make weight, and the smell of exhaust and fried food wafted in.

Big D’s voice was as big as his belly, and he boomed: “Come on, Magik,” he said. “Let’s do it!”

I couldn’t resist Big D’s gravity. I smiled awkwardly, took a deep breath, leaned in, and with four monotone syllables said: “I do magic!”

Big D sang: “I bust a rap!”

I said: “I amaze the Belaire Bengals.”

Big D sang: “And I make ’em clap!”

“Word!” we both said and gave an awkward high-five in the cramped van bucket seat.

(I said, “I amaze the Belaire Bengals” around Coach, but in the hallways I said D’s original line, that I amaze a curse word referring to peoples’s mothers that has the same number of syllables as Belaire Bengals; that’s what got me suspended in the tenth grade by Mr. Vaughn, Belaire’s vice principle responsible for discipline, and why I was ineligible to finish that year of wrestling after only 13 matches, similar to how convicted felons lose the right to vote or own firearms regardless of the circumstances behind their arrest. We hadn’t known anyone could hear us, but Mr. Vaughn was like a jungle sniper who could be lurking behind every potted plant, and he said he wouldn’t allow cursing in the halls of Belaire, which was fair.)

We drove though endless stoplights. Jeremy and Coach practiced their Miranda Rights, Big D talked incessantly, and I mostly stared out the window and counted po’boy shops. Eight and a half miles later we saw the 39 story new state capital building, an art deco gem built by Louisiana governor Huey Long during the Great Depression. We called Huey Long The Kingfish, which would become the name of Baton Rouge’s hockey team twenty years later. He was shot and killed in the lobby of his beloved state capital when he was a senator and running for president against Roosevelt; the bullet holes are still there beside the elevator, covered with a protective plexiglass display and beside a huge mural of the shootout between The Kingfish’s dozen or so bodyguards and a lone Baton Rouge man upset about redistricting to ensure one candidate won in Baton Rouge. People in Baton Rouge seemed to view assassinations as a part of life.

Coach turned away from the new state capital and towards the war zone that separated us and our opponents, the Capital High School Lions. Capital neighborhood and only a mile from the new state capital, but it was separated by the elevated I-110 and I-10 interstates, separated by towering concrete columns that shivered as Big Daddy’s fleet of Teamsters driving 18 wheelers rumbling overhead.

Like a lot of cities back then, when the interstates were built in the 50’s and 60’s, they sliced through downtowns and created pockets of poverty. Homeless camps took advantage of the overhead interstates to shield their tents and cardboard huts from rain, and in the 80’s they used the cheap addictive drug of choice back then, crack cocaine. Gun shots were frequent, and, as a combat veteran, I don’t think the analogy of a combat zone was excessive hyperbole; in a way, a crack addict is less predictable and therefore more dangerous than a soldier or even a terrorist. Not even Big D ventured to the war zone, and he stopped making jokes and peered through the windows.

Coach seemed unphased. Jeremy remained silent.

We passed a new Martin Luther King Junior community center, and Michael told the same joke comedians like Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy said: whenever they drove down a street gratuitously named after Martin Luther King, even they locked their doors. Like Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Junior was shot and killed in 1968, though that was rarely mentioned in school. Maybe all of America viewed assassinations as a part of life back then; for a country under God, we seemed to be okay with murder, lying, adultery, and bearing false witness; not that I’m better, but at least I don’t say I’m doing anything related to God. Kids can smell hypocrisy, and even before I was co-captain of the Belaire High Bengals, I realized that most adults reeked worse than Big D’s jock strap after a long football game in the muggy heat of August.

Coach turned onto North Street and passed the North Street Church, which had a cemetery pot-marked with bullet holes from northern soldiers. A few blocks later, we turned on 23rd Street and parked parallel to Capital High, because they didn’t have a dedicated gym parking lot. I flung the door open the moment Coach put the van in park. Jeremy opened the side door, and I squirted out like a wet watermelon seed squeezed between two fingers. D finagled himself out the door, and everyone else followed.

I stuck my head in to make sure the van was empty, slammed the door shut, and strapped on my backpack. Coach and Jeremy led us into Capital’s gym. I fell in last place, and The Belaire Bengals strolled towards the double doors of Capital’s gym.

The first thing I noticed was a hand-painted sign overhead, written in crisp yellow letters against a black scroll, that said: “Welcome to the Lion’s Den.” Inside, the Den was a small windowless building shared with wrestling and basketball. It was painted maroon, but gold, black, and green murals dotted the walls.

The Lions had spent their afternoon rolling out and taping together three hefty segments of a faded purple and gold LSU wrestling mat. It was centered between their two basketball goals, and framed on either side by worn wooden bleachers. After LSU was disbanded, Coach had dedicated a couple of LSU mats to local schools so they could start teams. He rallied the Belaire community and lobbied to the school board to buy Belaire brand new blue mats, but because school funding was – and is – still based on local taxes, Capital still used LSU’s old mats, and the faded purple was close enough to their maroon that no one noticed.

The Lion’s Den walls were painted maroon to match their singlets and warm-up hoodies, but the paint was so faded that the maroon was a close approximation of the faded purple, and the yellow on their murals matched the worn gold. Tufts of gray asbestos dangled from the rafters like the Spanish moss that hung from Baton Rouge’s stately oak trees.

The Capital High coach, a mountain of an African American man, was so tall he seemed to brush the asbestos with his mostly bald head. The Mountain had never wrestled, but he stepped up and took on the daily effort of running a public school team. He lumbered over and smiled and looked down at Coach and extended his right hand. Coach reached his right hand up and grasped The Mountain’s beefy hand, and simultaneously reached his left hand up and clasped The Mountain’s stout forearm above his wrist with a grip that crush boulders if it wanted to.

Coach looked up at The Mountain and said, “Good to see you, Coach.”

The Mountain beamed and said he was looking forward to our match. He turned to get back to his team, and we followed Coach into their locker room for weigh-in.

The room smelled like Big D’s jock strap after a day of sweating to loose weight, but wrestlers get used to that odor. The Lions were lined up from 103 pounds to Heavyweight, like a row of maroon-hooded Russian nesting Matryeska dolls. Their uniforms were new, and the maroon didn’t quite match their walls. Their hoodies and singlets were the exact shade of maroon worn as a beret by the 82nd Airborne, so there’s no way I could ever forget that color or the smell of a sweaty locker room, which is how paratroopers smell returning from a long mission and we’re crammed into the back of duece-and-a-half trucks that sounded exactly like Coach’s van but made it seem spacious and comfortable in comparison.

At the front of the line was a stand-up scale and a referee who would verify each wrestler’s weight. I ended up standing next to Hillary, who had stripped down to his tighty-whitey underwear.

He was a hairy beast with rippled muscles. He scowled so loudly that I couldn’t see or hear anything else in the weigh-in room. But I had defeated bigger guys than he, and I admit that I assumed because Capital was such a small and poor school that I’d be a better wrestler.

Hillary was 18 and the oldest wrestler I knew, though I’m sure there must have been a few 19 year olds who had repeated a year or two in school at some point in their lives. He was born in mid-October of 1971, and because of kindergarten age cut-off laws, he began school at 5, turned 6 a month later, and had always the oldest kid in class. He was a few fingers shorter than I was, so maybe 5’2,″ but his burly arms were proportionate, not gangly like a lot of growing teenagers, and his thighs bulged with muscles.

The joke about Hillary that year, though never to his face, was that he was tough because he was like Sue in Johny Cash’s song, “A Boy Named Sue,” That kid’s dad abandoned his son after naming his son, saying that having a girl’s name would make Sue defend himself against bullies and grow up tough and mean and able to stand up against a harsh world. But he wasn’t mean; he was terse and scowled all the time – at least when I saw him – but he was never mean. The reason so many out-of-state wrestlers at the Lee High Invitational talked about him was that Hillary was as skilled as he was strong.

I heard that he had been shaving since the 10th grade. Referees checked the skin of all wrestlers to ensure some didn’t shave a few days before to make their chins or forearms abrasive like sandpaper, but Hillary’s face was smooth and he smelled of inexpensive and common aftershave, probably Old Spice, though his arms were kept unshaven. I’d soon learn that even without shaving to get stubble, Hillary’s forearms were as abrasive as the steel Brillo pads all my grandmothers used to scrape their cast iron skillets clean, so he didn’t need to shave them.

He could buy beer but he never drank, though I heard that after the Lee invitational he bought a six-pack for his team to celebrate their matches against the Rebels. It’s hard to believe that they practiced their Miranda Rights while wrestling the Robert E. Lee High School Rebels, whose mascot wore a southern war uniform and flew a Dixie flag; in 1989 we were only four grandparents away from slavery, and it’s statistically probably that some of the Rebels’s family had owned Hillary’s family not long before, and there are many things about growing up in the south I find hard to believe from my comfortable home in America’s Finest City of San Diego thirty years later.

I was the opposite. I had turned 17 only a month before, and I was a mid-pubescent kid with disproportionately long arms, wide hands, long knobby fingers, and scuba fins for feet. I had drank and smoked at 14, like practically every kid back then, but I stopped both when I got serious about wrestling in 1988.

I was the youngest senior wrestler in Louisiana. I was born on 05 October 1972, and I began kindergarten in late August of 1977, at four years old and barely speaking full sentences. Had I been born a few days later, or if the cutoff date were shifted two days, I would have been too young to start kindergarten and held back a year to ripen before starting school. That would have led to me beginning my senior year at 17, and by wrestling season I’d be like Hillary and able to vote and buy beer. (Back then, Louisiana was the only state to not raise their drinking age to 21; to spite federal regulators, state legislators raised the drinking age to 21 but kept the purchasing age at 18.)

I had soft fluffy forearm hair, and I usually wore a grin, though that’s more of a facial feature I inherited from Big Daddy than a perpetual smile. Our cheekbones are high and pull up on the corners of our mouths, making it look like we’re smiling even when we’re not, and it’s one of the reasons that even FBI surveillance photos of Big Daddy make it seem like he’s happy to be surrounded Teamster muscle and mafia hitmen. My smile was part of my genetic features, but I was also a genuinely cheerful kid who relished practicing and performing sleight of hand magic. Unlike Michael, who had a 3.7/4.0 grade point average, I barely skimmed by with the 2.0 minimum requirement for varsity athletes, and on road trips I read magic books and practiced card and coin tricks with the freshmen, who hadn’t seen those tricks yet.

My toes were bulbous monstrosities squished into size 11 wrestling shoes that bulged like a stuffed boudin sausage skin. My blue singlet was pulled taunt by my long torso, and the sleeveless top allowed people to know that I had negligible underarm hair. My pale face and shoulders were dotted with bright red pimples that stood out against the blue singlet, and my auburn colored hair against my white skin and red pimples made me look whiter than I was.

My mullet wasn’t for fashion, it hid a few small scars on the back of my head, and one curved 8-inch scar shaped like a backwards letter C; the scar was, and is, about a finger width thick and bumpy from when the stitches pulled my scalp back on. I had been embarrassed by it since I was a little kid, so I always wore the back of my hair as long as possible, and it was a convenient coincidence that mullets were fashionable back then. USA wrestling allowed a mullet that didn’t fall below the collar, and I wore shirts with low collars.

I had never shaved and didn’t need to. I never stripped naked to weigh in because I was embarrassed to have only a few scraggly black hairs hidden by my underwear. My voice had already changed. I had stopped squeaking when I talked, but I still didn’t talk much out of habit. I was the smallest Partin of all my cousins near my age, even the girls, taller than Coach but shorter than Jeremy, so I was around 5’5″ in 1989.

I don’t know how much I weighed at Capital that day, because referees set the scale and you either pass or you don’t. I knew I was over 140 pounds, because I had planned on cutting a few pounds, and judging by how fast the balance arm dropped when the ref held it at 145 and then let go, I was probably around 142 that day. After weigh in, the Bengals put our hoodies back on and went into the gymnasium and watched the Lions warm up first. I stood beside Coach and Jeremy with my mouth closed and my hoodie lowered so that I could see more clearly and assess our competition.

Hillary led the pack of Lions onto the faded LSU mats to warm up. They trotted onto the mat to warm up in a line that began with their 103 pounder and ended with their 275 pound heavyweight, like during weigh in, but this time with Hillary in front. He wore his oversized maroon hoodie low over forehead, and his dark face was hidden in the shadow.

The Lions remained eerily silent as they trotted across the wooden gym floor in single file. The small windowless gym echoed with every stomp of their feet, but softened once they trotted onto the mats. They jogged in a circle and stomped extra hard on every fourth step to create an intentional rhythm that reverberated in rhythm popular with musicians like George Clinton and James Brown, who even I knew said that funk is always “on the one,” like ONE two three four, ONE two three four… It’s not unlike a ROTC troop marching in unison, but with a purpose: warming up and filling your team with pride, especially a team like The Lions in Baton Rouge, is useful when your team is heavily outgunned and your mission is honorable. I stared intently, wondering what they talked about at practice, and learning how other captains led their teams.

The echos reverberated in the small enclosed room and you could feel each one-beat in your chest. People in their packed bleachers stomped in unison, and the ramshackle wooden bleachers shook and rattled and squeaked on every one-beat.

Every team had its own warm-up ritual, but what stood out about Capital – besides the obvious racial difference – was the contrast of the musical echo of their feet echoing in the gym against their eery silence. No one uttered a word or glanced at us, they just stomped and circled in a gradually diminishing radius. When they finally stopped stomping, they sprawled into a tight circle and landed with their faces close together.

The spectators calmed down and gave the team a moment of silence. For about two minutes, the den was a church and only Hillary prayed. There was no stomping or squeaks from the stands, just an occasional cough or someone clearing their throat. Hillary looked each soldier in the eye and spoke a few words. Each one nodded back. I had never seen a team so focused on what a captain, and I never learned what Hillary said before each dual meet or tournament, but his team never seemed to tire of him like mine tired of the same card tricks every week.

When it was Belaire’s turn to warm up, we pulled up our blue hoodies and trotted onto the mat silently and without being synced. Jermey led, I was second, and all the other Bengals randomly split into two flocks following two leaders. Each half split again into smaller fractals mimicking the whole.

We naturally fell into zones of proximal development, small groups of three to five wrestlers who could all learn something from each other. The zone of proximal development is a concept from the Soviet Union after WWII, when 30 Million Russians died and left millions of orphans to fend for themselves in massive gymnasiums, without supervision but with researches carrying clipboards recording how kids evolve unconditioned. That study, I later read in education theory books, suggested that toddlers naturally form small groups where every kid learns a bit from each other; that’s the zone of proximal development, and it changes as people learn conditioned behavior based on who influences them. People learn at different rates, so Belaire’s groups changed weekly. Coach only stepped in to our zones when he saw something useful that we did not.

He often shared what he learned about the Russians and how they learned to dominate global wrestling in the 1950’s. It was the height of the cold war between the USA and the Soviet Union, so all the world watched the 1960 wrestling matches as a metaphor for global politics. To put that time into perspective, the failed American Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis that brought the USA and Russia to the brink of nuclear war was in 1962; China was not yet a superpower, and billions of people were learning from how the USA and Russia fought on the mat.

Coach, a man of few words, had mentioned the zone of proximal development once and using fewer words than I just did, yet somehow we followed it as if we had never learned another way.

I was in a zone with Steve, Ben, D, and Michael. We could topple Big D if we banded together and Steve did the heavy lifting. The only advice Coach gave groups against Big D was to think pure thoughts and hope for the best. I can’t recall the other groups; we changed every week, and I still say that Miasha always avoided my zone so that I wouldn’t toss him around and embarrass him in front of his mother, who was usually in the stands but hadn’t followed us to Capital. None of the Bengal parents did, which is what sticks in my mind, now that I think about it. But, back then, that was a long drive, especially for single parents who were probably working. It also wasn’t for another thirty years that we’d look back during the race riots of 2020, the one with the young Baton Rouge lady wearing a flowing white dress and standing fearlessly in front of armed Louisiana National Guardsmen, and make the obvious joke that in 20/20 hindsight we never discussed race in 1989, because we were wrestling so hard that it made us color blind.

Coach was obviously a reason, though none of us could explain how. Some times, you just had to have been there and known the person like we did.

The Bengals finished warming up when Jeremy said so, and we gathered beside Coach in Belaire’s corner of Capital’s mat. The referee stepped into the center of the mat and called the captains to join him.

Belaire was the only team in Louisiana with co-captains, and no one had seen two wrestlers step onto the mat when a captain was called. Hillary cocked his head and stared at both of us with stoic indifference, more like he processing new information than pondering why there were two of us on his mat.

The referee spoke softly to us and reminded us to wrestle fairly. Jeremy and Hillary slapped hands in a modified handshake to show the spectators we would take the message back to our teams. I held out my hand, but Hillary turned before slapping it and I don’t know if he had noticed. I glanced around, and Jeremy was already half way back to Belair’e corner.

I jogged to catch up. Jeremy sat beside Coach and I stood by the team, because state rules restricted the number of people on the mat corner to two.

Matches began at 103 pounds and proceeded up each weight class. I began warming up when the 129 pounders shook hands, because you never know how quickly matches can end and there was only the 135 and 140 pound match before mine.

Most wrestlers began warming up only when the weight before them began, but, Hillary warmed up at the same time that I did. He slipped a set of large headphones under his hoodie and stepped into a corner away from spectators. I put on my small foam headset and pushed play on my Walkman’s wrestling mix tape, a collage of 1980’s mid-paced heavy metal you could skip to, like Metal Health by Quiet Riot, and the more mellow and melodic Lunatic Fringe by Red Ryder, a song from the soundtrack of 1985’s wrestling film, Vision Quest.

Hillary and I warmed up the same way, though I don’t know what he listed to on his Walkman. We began whipping our arms around our chests and slowly pumping our legs up and down with oversized steps. Then we shook our heads and hands and feet faster, breathing in deeply and exhaling slowly. Hillary’s gaze was locked on the mat, and he never glanced my way. He began doing jumping jacks and squat thrusts, and I skipped a rope. 

Jeremy pinned his Lion, which triggered Hillary to move towards the mat. I tossed my jump rope towards our corner and donned the state mandated headgear over my ears. I struggled for a few seconds to adjust the vinyl straps, which were still a bit stiff after being left motionless in Belaire’s supply closet all summer. I barely understood the muffled sound of the ref calling us, but I knew the routine. I gave one more yank on the strap and trotted over and stood in the center and leaned forward to face Hillary.

We squatted into our stances, the referee checked that our toes touched the lines, and we slapped our right hands as a modified handshake to acknowledge we were ready.

The referee blew his whistle, and I instantly shot a low single. Hillary sprawled, cross-faced the hell out of me with his Brillo-pad forearm, and, because I was so surprised, my head turned to escape the pain rather than driving forward harder. He spun behind me and drove my face into the mat so hard I may have blacked out for a moment. I didn’t have time to process what happened before Hillary threw in a half-nelson and turned me to my back.

He rose up on his toes and thrust all of his weight onto my chest, and he cranked up on my head with his burly arm. My nose pressed into his hairy armpit that smelled of deodorant strong enough to override the mat’s fungicide. My eyes were wide open, and I was staring at the asbestos dangling from the roof rafters and still confused as to why.

I could feel blood gathering in my nostrils from being cross-faced so hard. My mind was whirling and overwhelmed with pain in my nose, strain in my neck, and pressure on my chest; his abrasive chest hair rubbed my bald and pimply chest raw. I was so confused that I didn’t wake up until I heard the referee slap the mat next to my shoulders and blow his whistle in our ears to signal a pin and stop the pain.

We stood back up in the center, and the referee held Hillary’s hand up in the air. Even with my headgear on, the applause from Capital’s bleachers was deafening. The stomps and squeaks and rattles blended into a single sound that added to my confusion. I glanced at the basketball scoreboard used as a timer. Hillary pinned me in 22 seconds; it had taken me longer to adjust my headgear.

I didn’t understand how that had happened, but it would make more sense in my mind after 2008, when Malcomn Gladwell published a book that summarized what happened. In “Outliers: The Hidden Secrets of Success,” Gladwell began with an obscure Canadian research study that looked into why professional hockey players were overwhelmingly likely to be in January to March. It wasn’t astrology. Like with Hillary and me, an arbitrary age cutoff allowed those kids to begin competing in hockey almost a full year sooner than their peers; for a four to five year old, that’s a 20% linear time jump on an exponential scale for strength and mental experiences curve. Over time, those differences accumulate with all skills; those who began with an advantage amplified that advantage every year and probably never noticed the roots of their advantages.

Gladwell said it was an example of The Matthew Effect, a term coined by a criminal sociologist who predated Gladwell and used The Matthew Effect to explain why crime-ridden areas deepen poverty and wealthier areas springboard success, taking the term from the New Testament Book of Matthew, 13:12, where Matthew quoted Jesus as saying something like:

“Whoever has shall receive more, and whoever has not shall have even that taken away from him.”

The only thing Malcomn Gladwell identified as being within one’s control was determination and perseverance, and even that was influenced by people like our parents, teachers, peers, and coaches. No one seems to know how all schools and neighborhoods can defy the Mathew Effect; whoever solves that challenge would make a great president regardless of who endorsees them.

If I had anything besides Coach to balance Hillary’s birthdate advantage, it was what my teammates called tenacity. I finished my tenth grade year at the Belaire Thanksgiving invitational with a 0-13 record. But, despite being ineligible to compete, Coach let me train with the team as what he called a Red Shirt, a term from football that lets kids wear red shirts and practice with the team until they’re big enough to be on the varsity team. I rejoined the team my junior year and finished with a record of 54-38. That was more than twice the number of matches Jeremy and other good wrestlers, because seeding brackets are stacked to place low-ranking wrestlers against the best first, and to seperate the best wrestlers so they’re more likely to meet in finals and have matches worth watching. It’s like the Matthew Effect. For those of us without high ranking, we get bumped into the loser’s bracket and claw our way back up to wrestler for third place. I began winning a few 4th and 5th place ribbons, and over time I simply wrestled more than better wrestlers and therefore got better. My training regimen was persistence and perseverance. Jeremy could still whoop me, but it got harder for him every day, and I probably trained an hour or two more every day than he did and wouldn’t be surprised if I could pick my weight class by state that year.

I returned to our corner. Coach grasped my right hand in his and squeezed my left tricep in a vice-like grip with his left hand, looked up into my eyes, and sincerely said, “Good job, Magik,” just like he had 105 times before.

Out of habit, Jeremy held out a hand towel to wipe off my sweat. I had more sweat from warming up than wrestling, but I still accepted the it, probably out of the same habit.

I stepped behind Jeremy and Coach and wipe it across my mostly dry forehead and subtly drug the towel under my nose and noticed drops of blood. I sat on the front row bleachers and in a spot the other Bengals had saved for me. I ignored a few jokes from the team, and leaned forward to watch the next match and dabbed my nostrils and tried to understand what had happened; I had yet to learn The Matthew Effect.

Miasha won his match by pin in the second round, which is a good thing, because he lacked stamina and often lost to less skilled wrestlers in the third round simply because he pooped out. No matter the outcome, he’d bounce back to our corner and make a joke and wish everyone good luck. He’d become vice-president of software at America’s largest bank, JP Morgan, where his coworkers would coincidentally nickname him Tiger, like the Winnie The Pooh character.

I don’t recall the 158 pound match. Todd panicked when the 165 pound Lion smothered his mouth and nose with a headlock towards the end of his first round; still gasping when he sat in the bleachers, he fumbled through his backpack for an inhaler, and through wheezing voice told me it was his final match. Steve was pinned in the third round by a kid not as strong but in with more stamina; Steve chuckled when he shook that guys hand and said it was a fun match. Big Head Ben fizzled out and was manhandled towards the end of the second round and pinned with only six seconds remaining; he seemed upset at himself, and mumbled something about quitting the team to help care for his dad at home.

Big D was pinned in the third round in what everyone thought was an even match; Coach shook D’s hand and told him “Good job, Mr. D,” and I said the same thing and meant it; most heavyweight matches happen in slow motion, but somehow Big D always seemed lively on the mat.

The Bengals and Lions lined up and walked towards each other, slapping hands one at a time to congratulate every wrestler. I don’t recall the overall team score, but Capital won about 70% of the matches. Coach and The Mountain shook hands and told each other good job, and we walked back out through the doors that had welcomed us to The Lion’s Den only an hour and a half before.

From Coach’s perspective, it was a victory for Belaire. Before we left the gym, he reminded us that this was the first time in our history that we hd a full squad. He said momentum carries teams forward. He pointed to the previous year’s first dual meet against McKinley High, when Jeremy, Michael, and I wrestled in two weight classes each just so McKinley would have practice in real matches, so simply by being on the team everyone was helping all of Baton Rouge improve.

“Rising waters raise all ships,” he said.

It as dark and 15 of us loaded back into Coach’s van. The other wrestles filled the Abrams’s Astrovan. Coach counted us silently and I told him Ben was ready. We left and passed back through the war zone and onto Florida Boulevard.

All of the windows were cracked open to allow air flow and to flush away the stench of our sweaty post-match uniforms. Everyone except me was laughing and chatting with each other and talked about what they’d do differently next time. Big D quipped that he couldn’t help me because he blinked and missed my match; Jeremy was finally relaxed, and told Big D he was probably too busy eating a sandwich to see anythings without mayonnaise on it.

The Bengals bantered and I slid into deep thought as the lights of strip malls and restaurants and liquor stores flew by. Absentmindedly, my right hand reached up along the van’s window and to the back of my head, where my fingers traced the biggest scar across the back my scalp, a habit I’ve had since I was at least five years old. The scar’s skin is slippery, and my fingers fit its width and slide along the backwards C shape and over the bumps from where stitches bunched the skin and ridges formed.

My two first fingers followed the scar up and down until I caught myself doing it. I brought my hand back along the window and into my lap so no one would comment. I grasped the towel and rolled it to hid the dabs of dried blood that had become darker than Capital’s hoodies, then sat silently and stared at lights flickering past us at 45 miles per hour. We turned away from Florida Boulevard by the strip mall filled with bright lights from the Vietnamese business district. It had hand-written advertisements illuminated by lights that said things like: “Bon-Mi, a Vietnamese po-boy,” a sign that we were less than a mile from home.

The van pulled into our gym’s parking empty parking lot and I opened the door and was practically pushed out by Bengals anxious for leg room and dinner. Parents, not soldiers, were parked under the lights and waiting to take their soldiers home. Jeremy, D, and Michael walked home.

I waited until all the Bengals were gone, strapped on my backpack, straddled my Honda Ascot, donned my helmet, cranked up the 500cc engine. The light came on and illuminated Belaire’s two-story dark red brick wall of our relatively large gym.

Coach waved from beside his big brown Ford F150. I waved back and rode out of the parking lot and onto Tams and towards home. Coach, like the Pathfinders and the 82nd Airborne, was always the first one to arrive and the last one to leave.

I was focused on riding and I didn’t glance back to see when Coach left. I had learned that he’d be there the next morning; he was the most consistent person I had ever known, and the most knowledgable. I’d wait until practice to ask him what to do about wrestling Hillary Clinton.

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