Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part I
But then came the killing shot that was to nail me to the cross.
Edward Grady Partin.
And Life magazine once again was Robert Kenedy’s tool. He figured that, at long last, he was going to dust my ass and he wanted to set the public up to see what a great man he was in getting Hoffa.
Life quoted Walter Sheridan, head of the Get-Hoffa Squad, that Partin was virtually the all-American boy even though he had been in jail “because of a minor domestic problem.”
– Jimmy Hoffa in “Hoffa: The Real Story,” 19751
I’m Jason Partin. My father is Edward Grady Partin Junior, and my grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, the Baton Rouge Teamster leader famous for infiltrating Jimmy Hoffa’s inner circle and sending Hoffa to prison.
My grandfather was portrayed by Brian Dennehy in 1983’s “Blood Feud,” where Robert Blake won an academy award for “channelling Hoffa’s rage.” Brian was chosen because he was known for his “rugged good looks” and charming smile, and because he looked like my grandfather, who was more famous than Brians was in 1983. In 2019, my grandfather was portrayed by Craig Vincent in “The Irishman,” Martin Scorsese’s 2019 opus about Hoffa, “The Irishman,” that sold out theaters until Covid-19 in 2020, then it set Netflix streaming records worldwide. Craig was chosen because he had worked with Scorsese before and was known as a big, brutal, thug, despite being a charming guy in real life.
There are many Jason Partins on the internet. A few are criminals, a few are people typical in anyone’s town, at least one is an aging mixed martial arts competitor with a few old Youtube videos (he looks like a younger version of me, coincidentally). One is my cousin, Jason Partin. He’s my grandfather’s nephew, and he was the football star of Zachary High School when I was wrestling 25 miles away at Belaire. Jason went on to play for Mississippi State University, and he currently owns the largest physical therapy treatment center in Baton Rouge. His smiling face looks down on I-110 traffic from the Lamar Advertising billboards that line I-110 between downtown Baton Rouge and Zachary.
Jason’s about my age, and he has my grandfather’s sky blue eyes and brute size. I have my grandmother’s dark brown eyes and my father’s relatively thin frame and slightly shorter stature, but we both inherited great-Grandpappy Grady’s charming smile. There’s only one old black and white photo of him and he’s not smiling in it, but Uncle Doug published it in his 2014 self-published autobiography, “From My Brother’s Shadow: Douglas Westly Partin Tells His Side of The Story.” When I was a kid, Grandma Foster, who remarried a Grandpa Foster after great-Grandpappy Grady left her, my grandfather, Uncle Doug, and Uncle Joe (who was Jason’s dad), told me that great-Grandpappy Grady Partin was where my grandfather and great-uncles got their smiles and charm. She smiled that Partin smile, and then told me I had the same Partin smile and charm that they did, which is what she told Jason, too.
My smile is more a feature of Partin cheekbones than a sign of perpetual humor or contentment, and it looks like I’m smiling even when I’m not. My photo’s not on billboards, but when I began writing this it was on the website of the University of San Diego’s school of engineering, where I ran an innovation laboratory and led hands-on engineering classes, and most people say the photo had a nice smile. If you saw it and one of Jason’s billboards, you’d assume we were related. Otherwise, I’m practically invisible online and there are no photos of me. There are a few forum threads with my nickname, LSU Magic, but without photos; and I’m listed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office as an inventor on several patents as either Jason Partin or Jason Ian Partin.
There are a few other inventors named Jason Partin, but all of my patents are for medical devices, implants, and technologies that help heal bone fractures and repair soft tissues. Most are focused on small bones and joints, like the toes and ankles, fingers and wrists, and facet joints of each vertebra in the spine. I don’t think breaking my finger in high school led to the inventions, but I used what I learned from wrestling to start companies based on them.
In the early 2000’s, I was presenting one of my first inventions to investors, Active Compression Technology, which we called ACT because I’ve always appreciated acronyms and puns. The patent was basically taking two halves of screws or plates and connecting them with a tiny spring made of NitiNol, a shape-memory and super-elastic metal made of Nickel and Titanium that was developed by the Naval Ordinance Laboratory (hence the acronym NitiNol). Unlike standard screws, ACT screws used NitiNol to adjust compression when wrist or ankle swelling went down or when bone resided due to creep or relaxation. The idea was similar to how you clamp a broken piece of wood together to make glue seal more tightly, but with a spring that adapts to unforeseen changes after you walk away. When I presented test results to venture capital firms, I smiled and held up my left hand to show what happens when bones are not compressed throughout healing.
My left middle fingers have a permanent gap starting at the middle knuckle because the break healed askew. Calcium built up around the break and pushed the ring finger sideways; ever since 1990 my left hand has looked like Dr. Spock’s split-finger salute, the one he used to wish someone a long and prosperous life. At each investor presentation, I’d smile a genuine smile and hold up my left hand like Dr. Spock, let them see that the gap was from the middle of the fingers, then told to live long and prosper. Then I’d push a button on my laptop to change slides and show an x-ray of my finger and the calcium buildup around an old fracture line. I’d tell them my finger would have been a candidate for ACT, so they should “act” now and invest.
I grinned the world’s biggest grin after that pun, but the investors didn’t seem to have the same sense of humor (or I just delivered the joke poorly), and they asked for more test data with stoic expressions between glances at the Blackberries in their hands.
It took a long time and a lot of rejections to form a company around ACT, and then a lot of time to develop the prototype into something usable. After several years of testing and development, ACT was acquired by an international medical device conglomerate. The original slide show remained on the big company’s computers, and so did the x-ray of my finger; to this day, it lingers in the quality control system because after the acquisition it became a part of their FDA Design History File. I never went into detail about who broke my finger, but it’s a joke I’ve been using since 1992, when I tell people Hillary Clinton broke my finger in a 1990 wrestling match.
The results of my 1990 match are available on the Louisiana High School Athletic Association web site, LHAA.org, after someone scanned the old score sheets and tournament results and added them to archives. I’m the Jason Partin that was pinned on 03 March 1990 by Hillary Clinton one minute and forty seconds into the second round. No one knew he also broke my finger, because if I had said anything the referee would have called the match and I would have lost by forfeit in the first round. Hillary won the gold medal that day and went on to win his forth state championship two weeks later, two years before Arkansas governor Bill Clinton would be elected president and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, would become a household name.
Since President Clinton’s election in 1992, whenever someone asked what happened to my finger, I grin and say I broke it Hillary Clinton broke as an obvious joke, and I rarely tell the whole story; but, it’s a great way to tell you about growing in Baton Rouge as Ed Partin’s oldest grandson.
Back in high school the joke about Hillary – though never to his face – was that he was like Sue in Johny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue,” a boy whose dad named him Sue before he ran off because he knew the world was unfair and he wanted Sue to “grow up tough” and “grow up mean,” which he’d have to do fighting all the other kids who made fun of his name. But Hillary wasn’t mean. He was the toughest 145 pounder in Louisiana, a three time undefeated state champion who placed in national freestyle tournaments every summer. He was terse and focused and intimidating, but he was never mean.
Hillary was born in March of 1971, and by the end of the 1989-1990 high school wrestling season he was a legal adult about to turn 19. He had been able to vote in presidential elections and buy beer since the 11th grade (Louisiana was the last state to raise the legal age to 21), and had been shaving since probably the 10th grade. Referees check for clean-shaven faces at ever weigh in, because a few rare wrestlers shaved a few days before a match to make their chins and arms abrasive like sandpaper, but Hillary didn’t cheat: he was just very good and disciplined.
He shaved his face smooth each morning before competing, and his stout hairy forearms were so strong that he could get anyone to turn their head with his cross-face without needing stubble to irritate their face; if someone grabbed his leg, he cross-faced the hell out of them and they either let him go or be so distracted by pain that he could spin behind them and score a takedown. Mostly though, because he also trained in judo and competed in national summer Greco-Roman tournaments, and he was short with a low center of gravity, he threw people to a pin.
Some time in the late 1980’s, USA Wrestling rules changed to add two pounds to each weight class beginning just after Christmas of each season. The idea was to account for growth spurts and not have kids starving themselves to maintain the same weight as when season began in October, so even though our weight class was 145, by March of 1990 Hillary was a 147 pound hairy terror. He was only 5’4″ and hadn’t grown taller in almost two years, so his extra two pounds went straight to muscle.
His burly arms were proportionate, not gangly like a lot of growing teenagers, so his body didn’t waste precious pounds on an otherwise useless extra inch of arms or legs. Hillary’s thighs bulged with muscles and his lats were wide, so to fit into his elastic wrestling singlet he had to wear a larger size than his lean stomach needed, so the singlet looked like a maroon-colored second skin painted over his upper torso, but with loose folds of maroon polyester his waist.
His skin was so dark that his singlet appeared a darker shade of maroon than the other Lions. Capital High was a 100% African American school, a lingering consequence of supreme court cases Brown versus the Board of Education, the civil rights acts of the 1960’s, and federal pressure for public schools deep in the south to integrate by withholding highway funding unless African Americans were bussed into white school districts; over time, people with resources moved away from locally-funded schools and left pockets of perpetual poverty in urban centers. (I won’t describe it too, much, because I’m sure Hillary Clinton would have more to say about all of it.) I lived near Belaire High School, about twenty miles away, and like most kids I knew I only ventured to Capital High for dual meets.
Their gym wasn’t large enough to host a tournament, but they proudly dubbed their small nook the Lion’s Den. Asbestos dangled from the rafters, and their recycled LSU purple and gold mat was faded and patched with grey duct tape. The walls were painted maroon to match their hoodies, but students had added gold and green murals of Lions and kings with crowns. I used to think were the colors of New Orlean’s Zulu parade – which also had a king and a crown – but I eventually realized the murals were Ethiopian flags and the Lion of Judah, a symbol of strength, courage, and sovereignty.
Across the doorway were large black letters that said welcome to the Lion’s Den. I didn’t know anything about Ethiopia back then, and I can’t recall the phrases and symbols written here and there as part of a school art project; what I recall is viewing the den as a metaphor from the Book of Daniel, where Daniel fasted and then was tossed into a den filled with lions to test his faith; it’s a logical analogy for a wrestler who had cut weight and was about to wrestle Hillary Clinton for the first time.
Hillary was captain of the Lions. He would be at the head of their team as they trotted onto the mat to warm up, his face practically invisible under his maroon hoodie and all of his team lined up behind him from 103 pounds to their 275 pound heavyweight, like purple hooded Russian miroska dolls stomping their feet in unison with their captain while remaining eerily silent. Every team had its own ritual, but what stood out about Capital – besides the obvious racial difference – was the combination of their vocal silence and the echo of their feet in the gym as they circled the mat for a few minutes. Their pattern mimicked a funky rhythm in the style of popular performers from the 70’s and 80’s, like James Brown or George Clinton, and they stomped the mat a bit harder every forth step, like the 1 of a 4 step beat: ONE two three four, ONE two three four…
The Lion’s spectators filled their relatively small set of worn wooden bleachers and stomped their feet in sync with Hillary and his team. The bleachers rattled with them, and I what sticks in my mind the most – other than how intimidating Hillary seemed – was hearing squeaking sounds from loose screws rubbing against the rusted metal frames that held together the aging wood planks on the softer two-three-four beats as Hillary tightened the radius of his team’s circle like a pack bearing down on prey.
When the Lions finally stopped circling and sprawled into a tight circle, they landed with their faces close together, and they did it on a silent cue that no one watching could decipher. The spectators would calm down and give the team a moment of silence, and Hillary spoke so softly that I never heard what he told his team as they prepared for battle; there’d be no stomping and no squeaks, just an occasional cough or someone clearing their throat.
When it came time to compete against an opponent, Hillary would stop warming up and take off his hoodie and don his light brown hockey mask, like the one worn by Jason in the 1980’s Friday the 13th slasher films, who also never spoke. He was one of only three wrestlers in the state to wear a face mask when competing; his nose wasn’t broken like theirs was, but the mask protected him from crossfaces and – I suspect – added to his reputation as a silent killer on the mat. He didn’t have to wear ear protection with the facemask, so maybe that was his motivation.
The only reason no one joked that he looked like Jason and I did not was that by then everyone knew me not as Jason, but by my nickname, Magik. I originally called myself Magic Ian, a play on my middle name that spelled magician on the business cards I had printed in tenth grade, but the Bengals changed it to Magik to be different than the LA Lakers star player Magic Johnson and the new basketball team formed my junior year,The Orlando Magic, which recruited LSU’s star player, Shaquelle O’neal. (It was a few years before the Red Hot Clili Peppers released the coincidentally spelled “Blood Sugar Magik” album.) No one had called me Jason since Shaq left LSU, and even my teachers at Belaire grew so used to the nickname that when I eventually graduated they had to retype my diploma and change Magik to Jason.
My letterman jacket, a gaudy bright orange fuzzy jacket with a big blue letter B on the chest, was adorned with a black scripted “Magik” across the back, and I usually wore it over my blue Belaire hoodie at dual meets and tournaments; the blue hoodie hung over the collar and emphasized the script. No one was intimidated by my bright orange jacket compared to Hillary’s face mask, though they may have questioned my judgement for wearing it so often, especially in the warm southern weather.
Hillary thew and pinned me within the first five seconds of the first round, but no reporter was around to document it; my nose bled profusely, but by then the match was over and they just wiped the mat before the next Bengal lost to a Lion’s throw.
Like a lot of us, Hillary had to sweat off a few pounds before each match. He would drape a black plastic law bags over his torso and run up and down the 34 flights of steps inside Louisiana’s state capital building. It was, and is, the tallest building in Baton Rouge and an icon of our city. It was tallest in America when I was a kid, an architectural gem built during the depression by Louisiana’s Kingfish, Governor Huey Long, when labor and materials were cheap. His photo still hangs at the top of the stairs by the bullet holes that killed him when he was a senator about to become president. Governor Earl Long, the Kingfish’s little brother, spoke about it and his brother’s legacy so proudly that when Uncle Earl (as people called him) visited New York City and stood among the world’s tallest skyscrapers, he kept rattling on about the 34 story Baton Rouge state capital as if nothing else mattered; to him and most people I knew in Baton Rouge, that was true; it’s our Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty meshed into one, and she’s only a half mile from the eponymously named Capital High School, which is how Hillary became a fixture running up and down the stairwell.
Practically every kid in Baton Rouge toured the capital in middle school. We always toured in spring, just before the New Orleans Mardi Gras parades and the Spanish Town parade that passed by the capital and sported floats from practically every Boy Scout troupe and church organization in town. In spring the southern Louisiana weather was still mild compared to our muggy summers, and the capital grounds were ablaze with red azeleas blooming and the air was filled with the sweet sent of jasmines; fall had frequent rain and possible hurricanes, so all teachers sought field trips in the spring, and the capital was a favorite trip every year’s new teachers organized again and again. We’d split into small groups to ride the ancient elevator to the top, where around twenty or so of us could stand outside.
Atop the capital was a crow’s nest with metal telescopes that cost a dime to use, but even without them we could see for dozens of miles along the meandering Mighty Mississippi River and across the flat forests between us and New Orleans. Upriver was Death Valley, the LSU Tiger’s stadium, fifth largest in the world and probably the most unique; the outside looks like apartment buildings because it is. Huey Long couldn’t get state legislators to fund a new stadium, but he convinced them to fund dorms for athletes; the dorms were built and happened to have an 80,000 stadium in the center. Upriver were billowing smokestacks from petrochemical plants at the end of I-110. Across the half-mile wide river were agriculture fields and the cement factories of Plaquemine. The Baton Rouge bridge connected us, a gorgeous structure rumored to be built below federal standards by Huey Long’s order, a trick to prevent larger barges from passing upriver so that they’d have to stop in the port of Baton Rouge.
Sometimes, while waiting for the elevator to open, I’d see high school wrestlers from the downtown training camp running up and down the steps in the stairwell like how Sylvester Stallone ran up and down the outside steps of Philadelphia’s state capital. The wresters wore multi-colored hoodies from almost all Baton Rouge teams, because the all-city wrestling camp was downtown near the capital building and they welcomed anyone from any school. It was a nonprofit formed by former LSU wrestlers, and all they could afford was a dilapidated and asbestos-lined former auto repair garage that they stuffed with faded and duct-taped purple and gold wrestling mats salvaged when the team was disbanded in 1979, when the Title IX law required all American universities to have the same number of females in collegiate sports as males. Title IX was fiercely contested, especially by male athletes and the 100 or so wrestling teams that were eliminated to quickly comply with the new law. Many athletes lost their college tuition, but the disgruntled LSU wrestlers who had relocated from midwestern towns to wrestle for LSU loved the sport so much that they banded together to open a training camp. They paid for it by hosting Bingo nights in a downtown community center once a week, but they only earned enough to rent the derelict garage.
The camp is no longer there but the building still is, and when you stand outside of its door on Government Bulevard you can see the towering state capital building only a mile away. Like Hillary and the Capital High Lions, wrestlers at the city camp would run up and down the state capital steps at least once a week. The weather’s mild in Louisiana, snowing only once a decade or so, but as kids we still felt the excitement of an approaching spring. For most of Baton Rouge, winter was the empty months between football season and baseball season, but for wrestlers spring meant season was approaching an end and there were only a few more tournaments left to make your mark on the world, and there was no finer place in Baton Rouge to see the whole world than atop the state capital. If it wasn’t open, wrestlers would still run up and down the 49 steps outside, one for each state in the union back then, and at least one of would reach the top and raise both hands and jump up and down like Rocky did.
When I became one of those high school wrestlers and ran up and down the steps, I saw Hillary wrapped in plastic bags and his face hidden under his maroon hoodie every Friday before Saturday weigh-ins. Like a lot of wrestlers, he’d sweat off a few extra pounds off of his lean fram at the last minute. Once, I saw him running in plastic bags while spitting into an old 16 ounce Gatorade bottle, chewing gum to salivate and cutting another pound by not swallowing for a few hours hours.
I assume that like Daniel and most of the competitive wrestlers I knew, Hillary fasted for a day or two before a match. There wasn’t a gram wasted on him. I never learned his average weight, but I assume he was around 154 pounds and cut down to 145 for Wednesday dual meets and weekend tournaments, and down to 147 after Christmas. At tournament check-ins after Christmas, he’d toss his gum into a trash can, strip naked, wipe his body dry, and fully exhale before stepping on the scales; the needle would barely move up and down before settling on exactly 147.0 pounds.
I was the opposite. I was born on 05 October 1972, which meant I began kindergarten at four years old, the youngest kid in class. Had I been born a few days later, I would have been to young to start kindergarten and I would have been pushed back a year and began at five years old instead of four, and I would have began my senior year at 17 instead of 16. Instead, I began my senior year as a mid-pubescent kid with disproportionately long arms, wide hands with long knobby fingers, and scuba fins for feet.
My blue Belaire singlet was pulled taunt by my long torso, but I lacked Hillary’s bulging muscles and I looked like a blueberry flavored popsicle. I had negligible underarm hair, and my pale face and shoulders were dotted with bright red pimples that stood out against the blue singlet. I had auburn hair that seemed to turn red with the increased sunlight of spring. My headgear was off-white, making me have, in a way, a red-white-and-blue pattern when I competed.
I had never shaved. Unlike Hillary’s leg and forearm hair, which was thick and curly like Brillo scouring pads used to clean cast iron skillets, the hair on my arms and legs was soft like the fur on a puppy. I never stripped naked to weigh in because I was embarrassed to have only a few scragly black hairs hidden by my underwear. The hair on my head was close-cropped on the sides, almost like in the army, but it was a bit longer in the back, like a mullet style awkwardly popular in the 80’s. My mullet was less to be fashionable and more to hide a few scars on the back of my head, including an 8-inch long, finger-width thick scar and shaped like a big backwards letter C that I had hidden with hairstyles of the 70’s and 80’s ever since I was five years old. My left hand, which wasn’t broken yet, also had a C-shaped scar along the first finger from tripping with a machete in my hand when I was ten years old, and the front and back of both hands were sprinkled with pinpoint scars from handling barbed wire on my dad’s farm on summer trips to Arkansas.
My arms and legs were lanky, like with most growing kids, and my hands and feet were gangly and disproportionately big for my torso. But I had strong legs from hiking the Ozark mountains of Arkansas with dad most summers, hiking backpacks of horse manure and chicken shit to fertilize fields of marijuana hidden in the forests until we were caught and he was sent to prison in 1986, the same year my grandfather father was released. (The machete scar is from when I was helping my dad cut down male plants at the beginning of summer, before they fertilized the females; and the barbed wire scars were from building fences around our cabin and vegetable garden.)
My cross-face was strong, not because I had upper body strength, but because when I pushed my fist across someone’s face my bulbous thumb knuckle caught and opponents nose and hurt more than a Brillo pad on your forearm ever could. I was rarely taken down by a shot because of my crossface, but my Achilles Heel, a weakness I couldn’t seem to overcome, was a lack of upper body strength, and I was vulnerable to throws and bear hugs by stronger opponents like Hillary.
I read a Malcom Gladwell book in 2008 that explained Hillary and me, “Outliers, the Story of Success.” It focused on hockey players in Canada after someone noticed that professional players were statistically likely to be born the first few months of the year than summer or fall. It turns out that like Hillary, Canadian kids born in spring started each year of school as the oldest kids in class. The difference between four and five years old is more than 20% of life, and every year those kids were grouped together and accelerated faster, then they began the next school year ahead of their peers physically and mentally. The pattern continued each year from elementary school, middle school, and high school, and the gap of opportunity widened over their lifetimes and it took researchers to identify the pattern. The advantages of being born in spring and beginning with more size and experience created a self-fulfilling prophesy where the best get the best opportunities and therefore stay the best.
Gladwell, a Canadian by birth and journalist for The Washington Post and writer for the New Yorker Magazine, was already an influential author and he created a term that caught on nationally, “The Matthew Effect,” named after the New Testament’s Matthew 13:12, where Matthew wrote something like:
Whoever has, will be given more, and they will have an abundance; whoever does not have, even that will be taken from them.
In Outliers, Gladwell starts with the Canadian hockey players, but though dozens of interviews and case studies and research reports, he shows how socio-economic factors impact success, and how constant, persistent determination and practice seems to help anyone succeed. He interviewed people like Bill Gates and cited famous bands like The Beatles, and pointed to the 10,000 hour phenomenon that implies 10,000 hours of effort is necessary to overcome obstacles. Most outliers, by Gladwell’s definition, create their abundance.
If I had anything in abundance, it was what my teammates called tenacity. No one who knew me would say I was either tough or mean; my reputation was for smiling, making puns, doing coin tricks, and training hard. I had lost all 13 matches of my brief, three week stent of wrestling in the 10th grade (when my dad went to prison), and I began my junior year not much better. But by the end of the 1988-1989 season I was ahead 75 wins to 36 losses.
That’s twice the number of matches most kids have because of how tournaments run; you must loose twice to be eliminated, and the highest seeded wrestlers begin by competing against the lowest seeds to reduce the likelihood of an upset and increase the chances of the two best wrestlers meeting in finals and having more exciting matches for spectators. If you loose in the bracket for first and second place, you drop down to the losers bracket and claw your way to what we called finals for third place.
The first and second place winner may have only wrestled two or three matches, and those matches were stacked to be easier; it’s a version of the Matthew Effect that played out every winter weekend during wresting season. For those of us who populated the losers bracket, we began in the top bracket against the best and would start over in the bottom bracket and wrestle five or six matches on our way to third-place finals. A year of fighting in the loser’s bracket was like putting in 10,000 hours of work. If I had a secret to success as an inventor later in life, it was the number of matches I wrestled in 11th grade and the persistence I developed as a Bealire Bengal. I don’t know how many people born with privileges develop the same tenacity.
I began my senior year at 16 years old, but, by a quirk in Louisiana law I was like Hillary in that I was a legal adult before my the year began. I had lived with my Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo toward the end of my junior year, when I was wrestling five to six matches every weekend. They were my mom’s family, French Canadians who settled in Baton Rouge (which means “red stick” in French, Uncle Bob taught me), and they took me in when my mom had bouts of depression. They were childless and spent their time and money having fun; Uncle Bob was rarely sober after 5pm. His cancer spread quickly and he passed away soon after season ended, and Auntie Lo was a lush and I couldn’t stay with her. I couldn’t get a driver’s license to attend summer wrestling camp without parental consent, so I petitioned the court system for emancipation. An emancipated kid can’t suddenly vote or buy beer, but they do things without parental approval, like get a driver’s license and sign a contract.
My emancipation petition was overseen by the coincidentally named Judge Robert “Bob” Downing of the East Baton Rouge Parish Court 19th Judicial District. Louisiana is the only state in America with parishes instead of counties, a quirk left over from Catholic influence when the French colonized Louisiana (which was named after France’s King Louis and Queen Anna), and to this day Louisiana is the only state in the United States with a legal system based on the European Napoleonic code. Louisiana’s system of law gives judges more leeway than in other states, and Judge Bob (as I called him) was impressed that I knew that. Uncle Bob taught me a lot of things like that, but like most things teenagers knew I took credit for it myself. Judge Bob respected that I earned the $140 fee to file for emancipation by hustling a three mid-summer magic shows for middle-school birthdays and an event at the public library that was covered by the Sunday Fun section of the Baton Rouge Advocate.
Like most people in town, Judge Bob knew the Partin family well. He had also seen me in the newspaper for wrestling and performing magic with the local magic club, Ring #178 of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, The Pike Burden Memorial Ring; earlier that summer, I had won the state magic convention’s junior magician of the year, and of course Judge Bob had read about that, too, and he remembered it only because he noticed every time a Partin was in the newspaper for something other than crime, which was only ever me, my cousin Jason, and Jason’s dad, Joe Partin, one of my grandfather’s little brothers and Zachary’s football coach and principal.
My dad had gone to prison as part of President Reagan’s much-hyped been released from prison but I hadn’t seen him in a year and had a few stamped postcards from him to prove it; my dad wrote from different border crossings, saying he wanted to leave the country and expounding on what an asshole Reagan was, and Judge Bob used those postcards to justify waiving the waiting period for my dad’s approval. He met my mom, who was in another bout of depression and didn’t contest the petition, so Judge Bob stamped my paperwork with the raised seal of Louisiana, a huge pelican nesting baby pelicans, and signed his name across the seal and penned in the date, 03 August 1989. The Baton Rouge Advocate mentioned it in their weekly court summary, which is now available online. It simply said:
Jason Ian Partin was emancipated by Judge Robert Downing of the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District, and has all of the privileges entitled by emancipation.
The piece of paper 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 pimples on a kid’s face. A court secretary gave me a legal sized envelope on my way out, and I carried both to meet my girlfriend, Lea, nicknamed Princess Lea like in Star Wars, 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, showing 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 on Florida Bulevard nicknamed Little Saigon; the cover had original artwork, an ornate cross with a skull wearing a hat at each corner. It was one of the country’s best selling albums and had been out since 1987, one of the bands to come out of Los Angeles and the Sunset Strip, like the already popular Motely Crue and a lot of bands that used hairspray and had enviable mullets, but popular trends were sometimes slow to reach all the way down to Baton Rouge.
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 there a few months before and he 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 my emancipation proclamation to him and he unfolded it and looked up at me from behind his desk, and I began the process of joining the army.
The law required someone joining the army’s delayed entry program to do ten pushups; I did mine one handed, not entirely to show off, but for the extra exercise. I picked that up from the 1985 film Vision Quest, where he senior wrestler did pushups waiting for elevators and between classes, never wasting an opportunity to burn calories and get stronger so that he could wrestle the three-time undefeated state champion named Shoot. The analogy was obvious, but I couldn’t argue with the logic and I began doing pushups whenever I had nothing else to do.
I asked if he wanted me to do ten with my left hand, too. He said that wasn’t necessary, and I probably looked disappointed; in hindsight, I was also probably showing the recruiter that I didn’t need the army to be all I could be, I just needed time and a way to get to and from wrestling practice. The hooky army slogan was as obvious as me copying Vision Quest, but in the film Lauden was using some of his time to study for college so he could become a gyencologist; I planned on going to the army, so I didn’t see the need to take time away from exercising my body to exercise my mind.
And I had grown cocky in the face of adults. A slightly overweight person sitting behind a desk either didn’t represent the slogan he advertised or wasn’t trying; if I were to represent the Belaire Bengals, I’d do it 24 hours a day, and if I were to wear a uniform I wouldn’t do it with my belly pushing against the buttons or a roll of neck fat poking above my collar.
I signed a contract joining the army’s delayed entry program 11 months before I’d ship off to basic training, where, in exchange for such a long delayed entry, I’d automatically be granted an E2 rank, which paid $75 more a month than E1. I was guaranteed infantry training if I graduated high school, and an assignment with the 82nd Airborne if I passed Airborne school. I agreed to give up $100 a month of pay for a year in exchange for $36,000 towards college after service, and another $100 a month towards Series E savings bonds that had tax-free profits if used for education. I had done my research and talked with Uncle Bob as he lay dying, so even though I was a 16 year old kid I had visions of what I wanted my life to be like when I was Uncle Bob’s age. He had died at 64 years old, an age I couldn’t understand yet, but he had been so young at heart that somehow I saw myself in him. Towards the end of his days, Auntie Lo would crumble medical bills and sob over her glass of Scotch for just a few hundred dollars a week, and the idea of loosing $100 a month was overwhelmed by the unfathomable sum of $36,000 I’d receive in return; it was an amount so grand it might as well have been millions of dollars, and though I didn’t have a plan for it yet I’d be foolish to value $100 a month more than millions of dollars.
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 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. Two hours later, I no longer had braces. He fit me for a retainer and said that wearing it at night would be the best compromise, and that 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.
Lea was prone to dramatize things. She was about to start Southeastern University and study theater and drama, and 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. She smoked and I practiced moving my mouth around to get used to not feeling braces against my lips.
We parked along the levee in front of the old old state capital, a building built like a castle and perched on the tallest hill in Baton Rouge, a twenty 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 Igloo cooler with a few beers she had bought to celebrate, but I had stopped drinking the year before to focus on wrestling. She knew that, she just liked beer and had just turned 18 and enjoyed flashing her ID to buy it. She had a Coke for me, but I had given up sugar, too, only just realizing the difference between simple carbohydrates and complex ones after reading one of Coach’s training magazines about it. I was happy with water, I said.
Mark Twain called our old state capital the worse eyesore on the Mississippi River in his autobiography, Life on the Mississippi, but most people I knew adored it. As kids, many of us rode down it’s hill on pieces of cardboard boxes as if we were sledding, and to us the old capital looked like a fairy tale castle perched atop a mountain. It was, and is, a Baton Rouge icon. 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 only saw the castle and the Mighty Mississippi River. I had always enjoyed sitting on the mounds and staring over the levee and across river at fields of sugarcane and Plaquimine’s cement factories, watching barges drift by on their way to or from New Orleans. That was Lea’s gift to me: a moment to sit and process all that had happened that day.
She finished her beer and another cigarette, and we found a giant old stately oak tree with enough gnarled branches to hide us from site.
“Coach gave us marriage advice,” I said, practicing talking without braces; my lips had more freedom to move than they had in two years, and I had to concentrate on not spraying spittle when I talked.
Lea raised an eyebrow over her narrow eye. She was half Japanese on her mother’s side, but had her dad’s thick eyebrows. She looked ambiguously foreign – kids who didn’t know her background said she looked exotic, like Angelina Jolie or other actresses who were becoming more famous because they looked exotic.
“He held up his finger,” I began, holding up my finger. “And said…” I changed my voice to mimic his raspy midwestern accent and said, “Gentlemen: The secret to a happy marriage is, not 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 shrugged. “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.”
“Hmm,” she said. “That must be nice.”
I didn’t tell her that it was a rare day to have kids at school in summer; a gaggle of Belaire Middle school had gathered with an interest in wrestling. I had facilitated it after performing a magic show for one of the middle school kids and mentioning that I wrestled for the Belaire High Bengal wrestling team; I mentioned it to explain the large patch of red and raw mat burn across my right cheek and eyebrow; it was still there, but Lea was so used to it she never asked what happened.
Lea and I rare discussed our home lives. To us, asking how someone’s day was would be the most invasive thing you could do. We had been friends and more for years. She was a year and a half older, and though I was still mid-pubescent I had been able to perform for almost a year and even ejaculated a bit; none of her friends knew I had scraggly public hair.
Though I didn’t know it yet, I had lost my virginity to her the year before, just after Hillary Clinton broke my nose. It was at our first dual meet of 1987, a warm day in mid November, and a dual meet against Capital in their Lion’s Den; but I was so young I didn’t know what was going on and didn’t have foresight to know about things like warm up rituals and names I should remember. I was just following what the kid in front of me did to get in the field-trip van Coach borrowed once a week or two, and Hillary wasn’t wearing a hockey mask back then. I weighed around 133 or 134, so I filled our empty 136 pound slot. I listened to Coach’s advice and just went out and did my best. I shot because why not; and he sprawled and crossfaced me and my nose erupted as he spun behind me, threw in a half Nelson, and turned and pinned me while I choked on my blood. The match lasted 8 seconds, the same amount of time you’re supposed to hold onto a bucking bull in an old-school rodeo, and that’s what it felt like: getting thrown by a bull, horns gouging you and slamming you to earth in a splatter of your own blood, and having a stadium full of people applauding and celebrating it like it was the best thing they’d ever seen.
The referee should have called the match at the first site of blood, but he didn’t and it was only a few more seconds until I was pinned, anyway. Calling a match for blood was a new rule back then; the first cases of AIDA and HIV were reported in 1985, and the President Reagan administration did not acknowledge it for a few more years. (Even then, they were reluctant to say anyone other than homosexuals and drug addicts could get it.) But what was most remarkable for me was that I quit and pinned myself to the mat because I was terrified by the claustophobic feeling of being squeezed while I was swallowing blood and couldn’t breath; that’s when I finally understood why a wrestler cuts weight. The kid I wrestled weighed 136 pounds, too, but he was ridiculously larger and stronger and faster – a Goliath to my David. If I wanted to be on the wrestling team, I’d have to either get bigger faster, or cut weight.
I was lean, but hadn’t thought to cut weight; Coach never discussed the controversial topic with us, other than to say things about balance. He sounded like The Buddha, that balance was between the extremes of indulgence and denial, but in a folksy midwestern way that made you smile. I didn’t really hear him, and I ate breakfast and drank a soda and weighed whatever I weighed (the soda alone was almost a pound, and I hadn’t pooped that day or sweat at all the night before). I couldn’t imagine facing that Lion again, so I leaned towards denial and cut down to then to 126; that was overcompensation, and I finished 1988 at a healthy 132. I never crossed paths with that Lion again, and wouldn’t realize who he was until I shook hands with him before our first dual meet in November of 1989 that I’d make the connection. By then I was a balanced 145 pounds, co-captain and Jeremy was by my side; I thought things would be different that time. But Hillary came out wearing that mask and threw me to my back and pinned me in 22 seconds. (I had gotten marginally better.)
That weekend, my nose was swollen and I had slight raccoon eyes, and I lost my virginity to Lea after the Belaire homecoming dance. (She drove us in her dad’s van). Ten months later, I was a 16 year old adult and she was about to begin her freshman year at Southeastern University in Hammond, about an hour from Baton Rouge. I thought the summer would never end.
We talked about what she was reading, martial arts (she was in a Ku Kempo dojo), and the river. As sunset approached, we 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. It wasn’t as eventful of a day as Ferris Bueller’s Day off, but it was a remarkable first day as an adult; had Mark Twain had days like ours, maybe he would have appreciated the old state capital more.
Lea’s dad offered me to stay, but her family lived too far from Belaire to attend practice practically, so at the end of summer I moved with mutual friends of ours who lived three miles from school. Her former fifth grade math teacher, Mrs. Barbee Abrams, and the Abrams family; Ben Abrams was an honor student the friend who introduced me to wrestling in the 10th grade, and his brother, Todd, was the state martial arts champion who trained at a dojo with Lea (though she smoked, she was active and flexible, and she could just as easily kick Todd in his face as his crotch.) She planned to visit on weekends and spar with Todd and their weekly group at his house, 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 liesure. 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, though the only people beside my mom, Judge Bob, and the recruiter who knew that were Lea and The Abrams family. I was unsure if it would affect my sports eligibility, so I asked them to keep it a secret. I knew I’d focus on training to wrestle, not with hopes of defeating Hillary – whom I still hadn’t remet yet – or to mimic Vision Quest’s coming of age story or any story, but because I knew that the army recruitment slogan was possible without needing to join anything. I was Ed Partin’s grandson, and I had his smile and charm. Grandma said I could do anything I wanted; Coach said I was the first co-captain he’d ever seen, and if why not try your best at it, and I said I wanted to try. Anyone who needed a uniform to be their best was, in my mind, missing the point of wrestling.
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- From “Hoffa: The Real Story,” his second autobiography, published a few months before he vanished in 1975 ↩︎