Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part II
Partin Reign May be Short-Lived
Edward G. Partin, start witness in the trial of Jimmy Hoffa, is now reigning supreme over the Teamsters in central Louisiana.
‘I’m not going to have Partin and a bunch of hoodlums running this state,’ Gov. McKeithen told us. ‘We have no problems with law-abiding labor. But when gangsters raid a construction project and shoot men up at work I’m going to do something about it.
‘Partin has two Justice Department guards with him for fear Hoffa will retaliate against him,’ Gov. McKeithen said, ‘This gives him immunity.’
The governor referred to an incident in Plaquemine when 45 to 50 men shot up 30 workers of the W.O. Bergeron Construction Co.
“Baton Rouge has never has such a siege of labor violence as it’s seen since Partin came back from the Chattanooga trial with two Justice Department guards to protect him.”
New Orleans State Times, 27 January 1968
I was only 16 years old my senior year of high school, but, by a quirk in Louisiana law I was a legal adult, like Hillary; I couldn’t vote buy beer like he could, but I could sign contracts and get a driver’s license without parental consent, and, if I wanted to, drop out of school and find employment.
I grew up in and out of the Louisiana foster system. When I was an infant, my dad, Edward Grady Partin Junior, was arrested every few months for selling drugs when he was a student at Glen Oaks High in the early 1970’s. Because of his name and federal oversight while Hoffa was still in prison, he was never convicted. My mom, who was a junior at Glen Oaks when she met my dad, had a nervous breakdown and fled the state soon after I was born. They dropped out of school and eloped to Woodville, Mississippi, where my dad knew people they could stay with, and where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old pregnant girl to get married. They returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Grady Partin, and lived in one of Big Daddy’s houses near the thick forests around the Achafalaya Basin; conveniently, no one needed to update the name in Baton Rouge’s phone book.
Judge Pugh of the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District removed me from their custody sometime in 1973, just after Hoffa was pardoned by President Nixon but banned from returning to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters unless Big Daddy recanted his testimony. The two events aren’t related, except in my mind as I look back on what happened; the only way a judge would risk antagonizing Edward Partin was if Hoffa were no longer in prison and Big Daddy’s federal oversight weakened.
In 1976, soon after Hoffa vanished, Judge JJ Lottingger overrode Judge Pugh, who had allegedly committed suicide after removing me from Partin custody, and gave my mom full custody. My foster parents appealed, and I floundered back and forth for another few years until my dad and mom decided to split custody of me between Louisiana during the school year and Arkansas over summers, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter breaks.
When my dad went to prison in 1986, a casualty of President Reagan’s war on drugs, I bounced around the foster system again, and spent some time with Grandma Foster and some time with my mom’s mother, my Granny, who lived five blocks away from Grandma Foster, where my dad had lived in high school. I lived with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob, my mom’s childless aunt and uncle from Canada, the spring and summer of 1989, but Uncle Bob developed an aggressive spinal cancer and was in Our Lady of the Lake Mary Bird Cancer Center for about two months; he returned home to begin hospice, and he died on 03 August 1989.
As he lay dying, I petitioned the new family court judge, Judge Robert “Bob” Downing, for emancipation from my family. Like most people in town, Judge Bob knew the Partins well. Of course everyone in America had seen Brian Dennehy portray him in 1983’s Blood Feud, but people in Baton Rouge were reminded of the Partins every day.
For a city of only around 150,000 people and only a dozen Partins in the phone book, there was a lot of media focus on us. After Big Daddy went to prison in 1980, my uncles, great-Uncle Doug Partin (my grandfather’s other little brother), and Uncle Keith Partin (my dad’s little brother), stepped in as Teamster leaders. Big Daddy had brought his little brothers with him when he moved to Baton Rouge, and though Joe preferred to be football coach at Zachary, Doug followed in his big brother’s footsteps. Keith was my dad’s little brother, a 6’6″ and 280 pound smiling replica of Big Daddy and Doug. The newspapers loved them all, especially Joe, who was the only football coach turned principal that anyone had heard of.
I had been in the newspaper a few times that year. Not just the black and white sections, but in the full color Sunday “Fun” section, highlighting the magic club and my volunteer work with kids younger than I was in the children’s wing of Our Lady of The Lake Hospital. We talked about David Copperfield’s Project Magic, a program to help kids in hospitals develop skills that fully healthy kids don’t have, and to facilitate hand-eye coordination during physical therapy. I had met David but declined to participate, instead creating my own version, and the Advocate reporter heard that and decided to make a two-page, feature article centered on me and the local magic club, The International Brotherhood of Magicians Ring #178, The Pike Burden Honorary Ring. One of the club’s officers was Dr. Steve Zuckerman, whom everyone called Dr. Z, and he was a respected neurologist who owned a few clinics around town. Nothing was mentioned to link me with the other Partins, and nothing was mentioned about why I spent so much time at Our Lady of the Lake; I had several copies cut out to use for advertising shows and for the twinge of pride I felt at my color photo being in the Fun section. In it, I had an admirable mullet, and I was wearing the gold rabbit in a tophat necklace Granny had given me.
Most kids are emancipated at the request of their parents, an attempt to detach themselves from legal liability for an unruly child. I was different in that I wan’t to detach from my family so I could focus on wrestling and magic. Because of Louisiana’s system, a form of France’s Napoleonic code an unique among all the rest of the United States, Judge Bob could waive the waiting period to reach my dad and get his approval for my emancipation. I said I hadn’t seen my dad since he was released from prison a year before, and I brought in a few stamped postcards to prove it. Every one was in black ink and in his meticulous, perfectly aligned script handwriting. If you glanced at them without reading what was written, you’d think they were done by a scholar or caring parent, especially if you noticed the first line where he began by telling me how much he loved me. But when you read them, they quickly evolved into rants about what an asshole Reagan was.
The cards were always nature scenes, moose in front of mountain ranges at the border of Washington State and Canada, a mountain lion from Big Bend National Park at the border of Texas and Mexico, and an elk in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where my dad said he could live out his days as a mountain man if that asshole Reagan hadn’t taken his land and money; it was unconstitutional! he penned in his immaculate handwriting. Fuck him! it said. One card called President George Bush Senior, who had been vice president under Reagan, a CIA puppet being controlled by the same evangelical assholes who had put Reagan in power. One card from Arkansas showed fog over the rolling hills of the Ozark Mountains, and it had a cryptic message saying he’d get his high school diploma and go to law school and show the world how the war on drugs was bullshit.
But, no matter how harsh the words, my dad’s handwriting remained calm and professional; in a way, that was the most disturbing part, as if he was calm and collected and had plenty of time to change his mind before adding a stamp and dropping the open-faced card in a mailbox for the entire world to see. I told Judge Bob that schizophrenia ran in my family, and my dad had a disconnect between reality and his relentless focus on conspiracy theories. No one who knew my dad or read his postcards doubted that.
In a year’s worth of letters, not one implied my dad would ever return to Louisiana, and there was never a consistent address or phone number to reach him. He had visted me once, the summer before, and bought me a set of extra-strong hand grips and a leather jump rope with fancy ball bearings in the handles so I could skip faster than with the old plastic one I borrowed from Belaire. Judge Bob listened to me and used those postcards to justify waiving the waiting period for my dad’s signature, part of the leeway granted him by the Napoleonic system.
He called a meeting with my mom, who was in another bout of depression. She listened, and stared down at her hands, which she was wringing together as he spoke, and didn’t deny that when Uncle Bob was dying she told me that I could move back in with her, but that I had to be in high school to do so, and I had to leave the day I graduated.
I’d be 17 then, I said. Six months away from being able to get a driver’s license!
If I wasn’t to follow in my family’s footsteps, Judge Bob told me, I needed the state’s support to take care of myself.
He granted my emancipation, and that’s the last I’d see of my mom for a few months.
Considering how sluggishly things creep along in a muggy Baton Rouge summer, he did it in record time, only a month. By comparison, when Judge Lottinger regranted my mom custody of me in 1976, I languished in the foster system for another three years. Because of experiences like that, I was pleasantly surprised when a month after I began my petition Judge Bob stamped my petition with the raised seal of Louisiana, a mother pelican nesting baby pelicans, and sprawled his name across it and scribbled the date, 28 August 1989.
I walked out of Judge Bob’s office with Judge Bob’s signature on my emancipation paperwork. The piece of paper and all the privileges it would provide only had one sentence typed in black font, but it was longer than a legal sized paper and looked comical, an oversized piece of paper with a few letters across the top like a sprinkling of pimples on a big kid’s forehead.
A court secretary gave me a legal sized envelope on my way out, and I carried both to meet Lea, who was waiting for me in her dad’s ramshackle but reliable work van. I plopped into the passenger seat and held up my emancipation paperwork and the envelope and grinned, flashing the braces across my teeth.
“It’s a legal piece of paper that doesn’t fit in a legal sized envelop,” I said.
She laughed and I folded the paper to fit into the envelop. She started the van and pushed a cassette into her tape deck and handed me the case.
She lit a cigarette and asked, “Have you heard of this yet?”
I hadn’t.
“Guns and Roses is my new favorite,” she said as she pushed play.
The tape was called Appetite for Destruction. It was a legitimate copy with color artwork, not one of the Zeroxed black and white covers of bootleg cassettes a lot of kids around Belaire had. The cover was an ornate cross like you’d see in an old Catholic church, but with four skulls wearing different hats at each tip of the cross; one skull wore a magician’s top hat,
I knew a lot of similar bands as Lea, bands like Van Halen, Ratt, Motley Crue and others with band members who had enviable mullets, but I had never heard of Guns-N-Roses.
Lea rolled down her window to let out smoke and turned up the volume. 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, cheesy: “Be All You Can Be.” A slogan like that could only be contrived by someone who didn’t wrestle.
I had been at the recruiter’s office a month before, when Uncle Bob was still sick but unquestionably dying, and the recruiter told me I needed my parents’s 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.
I handed him the bulging envelop. He unfolded the larger-than-legal paperwork and glanced at the single line that said I was emancipated. He looked up at me from behind his desk.
I pointed out the raised seal and signature, just in case he doubted the authenticity.
He said he had seen one before, and we instantly began the process of me joining the army at age 16. I already knew what I wanted, and he typed it into my delayed-entry contract.
If I graduated high school, he said, I would take a bus to New Orleans to join other recruits, then those bound for infantry would take another bus to Fort Benning, Georgia, where we would swear to uphold the United States constitution and begin basic training.
According to delayed entry requirements, I had to demonstrate ten pushups.
I asked if he’d like them one-handed.
I asked mostly to show off, but also to take advantage of every opportunity to prepare for my senior year and final season year of wrestling. He said that wouldn’t be necessary. I was a bit disappointed. I did them (effortlessly, I’d like to add) on my two punching knuckles, then I stood up with a smile and signed my contract with a flared squiggly-looking thing at the end of Partin.
He reminded me that the contract wasn’t binding, that I could change my mind all the way up until I reached Fort Benning, and even then up until I swore an oath to uphold the constitution of The United States of America. I thanked him. But, I said, I doubted that would happen.
Lea and I left the recruiter’s office and finished listening to Appetite for Destruction on the way to my orthodontist’s office. I had set up an afternoon appointment to have my braces removed even though I was supposed to wear them at least another year. When he asked what my mom would say about that, I unfolded my paperwork and held it up like an FBI agent flashing a badge. He said okay, and two hours later I was free from braces. I hopped back in Lea’s van, and we headed towards the levee to watch the sun set while I practiced smiling and talking with smooth teeth for the first time in three years.
Lea was prone to dramatize things. Her nickname was Princess Lea, like the character in Star Wars. Two months earlier, she had graduated from Scotlandville Magnet High School for The Engineering Professions, 40 minutes north of Baton Rouge if you drove, or around an hour and a half if you took the school bus. Lea’s dad gave her the van when she was 16 to make the commute easier for her, and we had been dating since my junior year at Belaire and her senior year at Scotlandville. Her eccentricity led to her being perceived as dramatic, which was probably true. She was a patient of Dr. Z’s, who prescribed her a mood-stablizing medication.
To Lea, everything was a metaphor. She said removing my braces was symbolic of removing the shackles of my family.
I disagreed. I said it was harder to breath when wearing a mouth guard.
She liked her version better, and said one day I’d see it her way.
I said I saw the metaphor but only I knew what was true for me, but that I was anxious to try out my lips’s freedom regardless of why it happened.
We parked along the levee in front of the old old state capital, a building built like a three-story castle and perched on the tallest hill in Baton Rouge, a forty foot mound of dirt overlooking the Mississippi levee that’s only a 100 yards rom the new capital. We hiked up the hill and sat under the sprawling moss covered branches of an old stately oak tree, took deep breaths, and sighed peaceful sighs.
She had a small hardshell Igloo cooler with a six pack of Milwaukee’s Best she had bought to celebrate, more for the joke of calling it Milwaukee’s Beast. But, I had stopped drinking the year before to focus on wrestling. She knew that, she said. She just liked beer, and because she recently turned 18 she enjoyed flashing her ID to buy it.
She brought a Coke for me, but I told her I had given up sugar, too. (Back then it was still made with sugar instead of the even worse for you high fructose corn syrup.) She shrugged as if I were free to choose whatever I wanted, even if it were as odd as not drinking Coke in the south, where it had been invented and practically poured into our bottles as babies. I sipped water from my dad’s old boy scout canteen that I carried in my school backpack, a leftover of his that I uncovered at Grandma Foster’s earlier that summer.
Princess Lea sipped her Beast and I explained the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates, which I had just read about in one of Coach’s training magazines. She listened, not because she was interested in carbohydrates, but because I was in a good mood and chatty.
She knew I had always felt at peace sitting on the mild slope of the old state capital. My first foster father, PawPaw, had taken me there to slide down the hill on a flattened cardboard box, just like other dads did with their kids, and my body recalled those years of happiness every time I revisited the slopes. I had pointed it out every time, and we were trapped in a positive feedback loop.
In his autobiography, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain called our old state capital the worse eyesore on the Mississippi River; but, unlike that cranky old man who grumbled about most things, most people I knew adored it. To us, it was our cherished castle on a hill. Like you could see from the state capital, all of southern Louisiana is flat; many parts near the river are a foot or two below sea level, as if the only place to slide down something was into a muddy ditch beside the levy. It rarely snows in Baton Rouge, but as kids we would pretends we were snow sledding down a mountain by sitting on pieces of cardboard boxes and sliding down the 30 or 40 feet of grass hill in front of the castle. It was – and is – a Baton Rouge icon, though much less revered than Tiger Stadium or the new state capital.
I don’t know what Mark Twain would say if he saw the billowing smoke stacks of petrochemical plants called Chemical Alley a few miles downriver from the two capital buildings, but I grew up knowing nothing else and didn’t notice them and I only saw the old castle and the new capital and the Mighty Mississippi River with all of its barges passing under the bridge.
The river was about a half mile across there, our own private ocean view. Late summer sunsets were always the best time to be there.
I didn’t know that only a mile behind us lurked Hillary, probably running up and down the new state capital stairs again and again. I had, in all sincerity, began thinking that I’d shoot for becoming state champion, like that guy in Vision Quest. It was just a thought that began itching at the back of my mind as soon as I walked out of Judge Bob’s office.
“Someone has to do it,” Coach had said, “And it might as well be you.”
Lea finished her beer and another cigarette, and we found a giant old stately oak tree with enough gnarled branches to get privacy from the few people walking by on a weekday afternoon. She was a snuggler after a few beers, and I cradled her and we chatted with our faces only a few inches apart.
“Coach gave us marriage advice,” I said, practicing talking without braces. My lips felt loose, and I had to concentrate on not spraying spittle when I talked.
Lea raised a dark eyebrow over her narrow eye.
I held up my finger the way Coach did when he was saying something important, and said:
“He held up his finger and said…”
I changed my voice to mimic his raspy midwestern accent, slowed my speech, and continued:
“Gentlemen. The secret to a happy marriage is: no matter what type of day you had, the first thing you do when you get home is kiss your wife on the cheek, and ask her how her day was.”
Lea cocked her head as if expecting more.
“Why’d he say that?” she asked.
I lowered my finger and shrugged that I wasn’t sure.
“He was in a good mood all day,” I said. “I think it’s his anniversary this week or something like that. He was smiling like a kid in a candy store all day. I think he and Mrs. K had a date night.”
“Hmm,” she said. “That must be nice.”
Not all of Coach’s advice applied to everyone.
To Lea and me, asking about someone’s day was invasive. It forced them to lie. Though I was still mid-pubescent, for almost a year we had been fooling around and I ejaculated a bit, but none of her friends knew the details or that I had scraggly public hair. And I never told anyone her mother was Japanese, or that Lea had developed her great boobs young, and was raped at 12 by an older boyfriend with a car (not even her parents knew that).
“We had a bunch of kids from Belaire Middle over,” I said. “Some from the shows I did. I was showing them some basics and invited a few guys from the team to meet us. Andy and Timmy showed up. They hadn’t found jobs yet, and told us how any of us could earn a living.”
Lea raised an eyebrow to show she was interested.
I changed back to my midwestern accent, held up my forefinger, and said: “Pig Farming.”
Both of her eyebrows went up in a mix of confusion or curiosity.
“Pig farming,” I repeated, just like Coach had. It had pricked our curiosity, too.
“They don’t need a lot of attention,” I said, still using a poor impersonation of Coach’s accent.
“But if you treat them well, you’ll be happy in life.”
We mulled that over silently for a while.
Eventually, she smiled and said: “They’re just like me.”
We giggled and snuggled more closely.
With her face pressed beside mine, we stared between the leaves at the barges floating up and down the river, and she said, “Tell Andy and Timmy I said hi. I won’t see them at Todd’s before school starts up in two weeks.”
I made a sound that told her I would, a kind of “ah-huh,” and we both sighed peacefully and watched barges float down the river in no hurry to be anywhere else.
You can see her in a crowd scene of 1985’s Everybody’s All American. It was filmed in Baton Rouge, and starred Dennis Quaid as The Grey Ghost, a southern college football legend and an All American. It was loosely based on LSU’s favorite All American Hero, Billy Cannon, star of the 1954 National Champion Tigers, All American, and Heizman Trophy Winner. He went on to play pro ball, then go do dental school and open up an orthodontist office in Baton Rouge. You could see his smiling face from atop Lamar billboards up and down I-110 when they filmed Everybody’s All American.
All the actors stayed in Teamster trailers and all the equipment was hauled across country by Teamster trucks, and 10,000 Baton Rouge people got to be in one scene. You have to squint and use your imagination, but a lot of us swear we recognize our middle school friends, neighbors, and teachers in that scene.
It was a replica of a famous touchdown catch with a dozen men lagging behind Billy, and they asked anyone who wanted to show up for a football game, just come dressed in 1950’s garb. The really cool girls knew how to use a sewing machine back then, and she whipped up a perky outfit, and her dark complexion blended in with all the Creole girls around her. (I was, incidentally, in Arkansas with my dad that Christmas.)
Lea was a quarter Japanese on her mother’s side. She had slightly narrow eyes because of that, but she had her dad’s thick eyebrows and animated facial expressions so no one seemed to notice, especially when she wore glasses shaped to emphasize roundness.
Her parents met when her dad returned from Vietnam and out-processed in San Diego’s navy base, where Lea’s mom lived with her parents in the Asian district off Convoy street; during WWII, they had been forced to live in remote southern California Manzanar detention camp during the ironic detainment of around 250,000 Japanese-Americans during a war to that liberated Jewish people from concentration camps. Lea was the first person to point out that Mr. Miagi in The Karate Kid briefly mentioned that his wife and daughter died in Manzanar, a single line most of us missed, spoken the one time we saw Mr. Miagi drunk, but that told an entirely different story to the few people who noticed.
Lea and I had shared everything about our families that we knew. Like half of Baton Rouge, her dad worked for Big Daddy at some point in their lives. She grew up hearing of her dad’s exploits stealing building materials from construction sites all over the southeast, keeping parts of orders in the back of his 18 wheeler and brining them to Baton Rouge, where Big Daddy used them to build a NASCAR racetrack called the Baton Rouge International Speedway. It was later renamed The Pelican Speedway, and when investors showed up, Big Daddy gave away tickets to anyone in Baton Rouge who wanted them, just to pack the stands and create the image of sold-out events.
It worked, and investors paid the ostensible owner, a Teamster Big Daddy trusted or at least knew wouldn’t cheat him, a large but unknown sum of money for the race track and bleachers built by Local #5. Pelican Speedway soon went bankrupt, probably because Baton Rouge was mostly a football and baseball town with little disposable income for other ventures, and was demolished to make way for a hospital.
But by then all the Teamsters involved were paid well and no one spoke of the theft or deceit, except for a few like Lea’s dad who told her where his new van and their house came from. Twenty years later, Lea used that van to drive us around all summer. She had graduated Scotlandville Magnet High, and would be leaving for Southeastern University an hour away in Hammond two weeks later. They had health insurance to treat both his daughters. To her father, my family could do no wrong.
It was August and the days were long. We sat facing east, and watched the clouds across the river slowly colors from a sun setting behind us that we never saw as kids, because we always stayed on our side of the river. At dusk, 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.
Their home was a cluttered mess of old Little Caesar’s pizza boxes and piles of partially completed projects, like a life-sized Klingon battlith from Star Wars, the Next Generation, several Renassaince costumes including a chain-mail version of Princess Lea’s slave outfit, and a few boxes of what was then science-fiction looking remote control cars and airplanes. Her mom rarely left the house and her dad had been on disability since the late 70’s and rarely ventured out, either, except to find parts for car projects that never seemed to be near completion. He was an amateur engineer and physicist, and had worked for Big Daddy when he got out of the navy doing nothing but hauling construction equipment for big companies all over the southeast. Big Daddy’s forceful method of getting him a worker’s compensation package from a construction site accident. He hadn’t worked for a paycheck since, but he stayed busy with countless projects and radiated gratitude for that opportunity.
“Any grandson of Edward Partin is welcome in my home,” her once told me, adding a grin that implied he hoped to one day be my father in law. The thought had crossed my mind.
“He never drank,” he told me that dame day. His tone had radiated admiration, as if not drinking alcohol were more rare than not drinking Cokes.
“Never,” he reiterated. “He said it loosened lips.”
“I haven’t drank since,” he said with the tone of someone who used to drink too often.
He leaned in and whispered to me, “He was really good with a knife.”
To get to her room, Lea and I had to step over piles of clothes that were patiently waiting for a laundry day that probably wouldn’t happen soon. Once inside, we had to crawl over her piles of clothes and a cage with her two pet rats, Meth and Amine.
“They’re very social,” she told me. “It’s cruel to keep one by itself.”
She lowered her tone, which meant she was angry, and said, “Any pet store that doesn’t sell you two should be banned.”
She took them out and we pushed clothes off her bed and let them snuggle on our chests while we sat silently.
That night, I thanked Princess Lea for a glorious day. It wasn’t as eventful of a day as Ferris Bueller’s Day off, I said, but I bet it was the best first day as an adult any 16 year old had ever had. If Mark Twain had days like ours, I said, maybe he would have appreciated the old state capital more.
“Big Daddy and Doug told me another story the other day,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow; it was so adorable that I had learned to start stories and then pause, just to get a reaction.
“About the Plaquimine cement factory across the river. Doug talked on and on about it. They walked over and knocked on the office door to get them to use Teamsters.”
I mocked knocking on a door above us.
“The managers refused and told them they’d never use union labor. They went home and modified some shotgun shells and went back the next day.”
I held up my left first finger and thumb as if holding a 12 gauge shotgun shell for her to see, and I said: “You know where the plastic meets the metal?” I pointed my right finger where that spot would be.
She nodded as if to say, “Of course.”
“Well, they cut along that with a razor blade so that it was weaker than the end with the pellets.”
I pointed to where that end would be.
“Instead of pellets, it shoots the slug out. They returned and Big Daddy shot a hole through the door. The shell exploded inside and peppered everyone with pellets, like a grenade. They left and said they’d be back in a few days to see if the company would reconsider using Teamsters.”
I paused. She seemed interested; not eyebrow interested, but curious.
“It turns out that the managers went to New Orleans and hired a bunch of guys with guns, like 40 or 50 of them, Doug said. Word got back to Big Daddy, and he had about that many guys from Local #5 ride with him. They had a shootout like the wild west, Doug said.”
I smiled at the memory, and said: “He was smiling the whole time. It sounded fun. Big Daddy pulled out his knife and showed where to cut, just in case I ever wanted to do it.”
“Why would you?”
I shrugged as if to say, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t like shooting shotguns, anyway. I prefer my dad’s .308. But I guess it’s good to know things like that if I’m going into the army.”
She shrugged to show she had lost interest. We snuggled the rest of the night.
The next two weeks was just as blissful. The weekend, Lea’s mom showed me my name in The Baton Rouge Advocate’s weekly court summary. They used my entire name, perhaps so there would be no confusion with my cousin. It 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.
I clipped the blurb out and used a paper clip to hold it, my emancipation proclamation, and delayed entry contract together. Lea scrounged around her room and found a manilla envelop to keep the together and professional looking, and I added them to my school backpack in case I needed to prove I was an adult.
Lea and I drove around town, played on the old state capital’s hill, and frolicked in the downtown government building’s fountain after hours. At home, I ate more pizza than I had collectively in my life up to that point. I gained a few pounds, and felt happier than I imagined possible; I had a family.
But all good things come to an end. Lea left for college in late August, and was renting an apartment in Hammond. She would be in town two weekends a month for her new job at The Gold Club.
Her dad offered me to stay in her room for my senior year, but her family lived too far from Belaire to attend practice practically. Instead, I moved in with Todd’s family, who lived three miles from away. I could jog to practice from there, and it sounded fun, like something that kid from Vision Quest would do.
Todd was Todd Abrams, son of Lea’s former fifth grade math teacher, Mrs. Barbee Abrams, and president of the Red Stick Flingers, a knife-throwing club Todd ran in Abrams’ back yard. He and Lea had known each other since the fifth grade, and though he went to Belaire and she went to Scotlandville Magnet all the way north of Chemical Alley, they saw each other weekly in groups like in the Flingers, Renaissaance Fairs, and at a downtown Ku-Kempo dojo.
There house was immaculately clean, yet packed with surround-sound stereo equipment and a massive television with a VCR, a Beta machine, and the latest laser disc technology; and also with knives and tomahawks sprinkled here and there.
Mrs. Abrams set me up on their couch, and I spent most days training with Todd, and per his suggestion, eventings watching the rash of 1980’s movies set in Vietnam, like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, etc., until I grew tired of them.
“Here,” Todd said, handing me a pizza-sized laser disc.
“Predator,” he said definitively. “Arnold Swartzanegger said he got bored making special ops movies against people, so in this one they go against an alien.”
He smirked and said, “Now that you’re in the army, maybe you’ll need to know how to fight an alien one day.”
I laughed and told him how to modify a shotgun shell, just in case he ever had to fight an alien.
When I grew tired of Predator, Top Gun, and even the films I once adored like Karate Kid and Vision Quest, Todd brought home Aikido videos from his dojo.
“They’ll help you wrestle,” he said.
“This one,” he said holding up what looked like a bootleg tape, “Is the only one of the guy who invented Aikido, Morihei Ueshi.”
“It’s the physical embodiment of Buddhism,” he said as if he knew what he was talking about. Todd could kick me to death, but once I grasped his ankle or wrist with my kung-fu grip not even Morihei Ueshi couldn’t help him. Some things you don’t learn just by watching, and as knowledgable as Todd was he lacked discipline; that’s why he had quit wrestling the year before.
Though Lea smoked, she was active and flexible and could kick Todd’s face just as easily as his crotch. She never telegraphed which it would be, and that was her secret against people who gave telltale signs when they tensed up before an attack. When she stopped by, she’d kick a few of the guys in either their crotch or face, and coach me on how to stop telegraphing my shots and throws. Mostly, though, when she showed up we stopped training and clustered on the carpeted living room floor to watch movies on the Abrams’s big color TV with surround sound stereo. When we timed it right, we’d watch Highlander and practice sword fighting with some of Todd’s training sticks.
A lot of the time, we just played music and did the ambiguous “hang out” that teenagers do. Todd’s older brother, my friend since middle school, Big Head Ben Abrams, who had wrestled at 189 pounds the year before, would come home from summer baseball practice or playing guitar with his heavy metal band to join us with a few other friends and former wrestlers from my first year at Belaire. They were a gaggle of mixed race friends in a group called The Atomic Dogs, named after George Clinton’s famous song that had come out a few years before. They were mixed races, a rarity in Baton Rouge friendship groups, and had nicknames like Slim Tim (he was tall and thin), Jap Rap (he rapped and was Vietnamese, but said he was Japanese to avoid discrimination after the Vietnam conflict), D-Day (a half-black gentle giant built like a tank from World War II’s D-Day), Mad Dog (he wanted to be a medical doctor, a MD like Dr. Z, who treated him for depression), and Fly (he drove a Mustang he called the Horse Fly). One was Steve Long, whose dad, Earl Long, was named after Mr. Earl’s uncle, Governor Earl Long. We called him Steve. He had wrestled at 171 pounds, but quit to focus on hunting and fishing with his dad.
Lea and a few girls from work would show up to join us on some late Saturday mornings for The Tick and Highlander reruns, though only Lea was consistent and considered a Lady Dog. Though they called me an Honorary Dog, a new one to the pack, I didn’t know them long enough to consider myself one. And I wouldn’t commit to being called a puppy; I had never joined the scouts because I didn’t want to start as a cub.
Mr. Abrams would be in their garage while we blared movies on the surround sound, chatting on his HAM radio using languages and codes I didn’t understand. Mrs. Abrams would be in the kitchen, shuttling plates of different types of sandwiches for us that were probably much healthier than the pizza at Lea’s house. I probably saw more movies my first week there than I had all of my life, yet my weight dropped back down to normal because I was training so much with the Ku-Kempo group and practically anyone who wanted to spar.
I also got pretty good throwing a knife. Todd had set up a huge empty power-line spool from a nearby construction site and tilted it on edge to use as a target. He ran the Red Stick Flingers, and traveled to Houston every few weeks, where his grandparents, Jack and Joyce, whom everyone called Opa and Oma, lived near a world-record knife thrower who gave him lessons. In Baton Rouge, I’d share tips from my grandfather, mostly about how to skin an elk and how to stab into a chest sideways, so that a blade goes between ribs instead of bouncing off. Whatever discipline Todd lacked in wrestling he made up for with knife throwing. He’d soon be listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the fastest flinger on Earth, able to nail a target with six knives in just as many seconds, and he’d be a guest on late-night television shows like Conan O’Brien using his stage name, Jack Dagger, in honor of his grandfather.
My most endearing memories of the summer of 1989, an otherwise sad year with Uncle Bob dying and my mom telling me I couldn’t live at home, was time with Coach and falling in love with the Abrams family.
The Abrams were an all-American family. A real one, not one made to seem so like mine. Mr. Abrams led a local boy scout troup and was a HAM radio enthusiasts with a 3-story antenna behind their garage that he would sometimes show us and let us speak with people all over the world. Todd was a junior at Belaire and star of theater, drummer in the Bengal marching band, and state martial arts champion.
Ben, who insisted his nickname was Big Ben, not Big Head Ben, was a senior at Belaire, honor student, baseball letterman, trumpet player in the Bengal marching band, and former wrestler who had introduced me to Coach in the 10th grade. Ben and Todd’s little brother, nicknamed Erik The Viking, was usually gone with boy scout events or week-long science camps somehow involved with Houston’s NASA center. Mrs. Abrams parents, who lived in Houston, would drive Erik back and stay in the Abrams’s guest bedroom, and I slept on the couch when they were in town. On Sundays, Mrs. Abrams and her parents would attend church while the boys and I played with their dad’s HAM radio and listened to accents from all over the world. Once a month, Mr. Abrams lent Todd and a group of his friends from Belaire’s marching band the Ford Astrovan Family Minivan, so that they could drive to and from Chicago for weekend practice with The Phantom Regiment competitive marching brigade.
Lea, Todd, and Ben were the only ones I told about Big Daddy. He was a heavyweight boxer in his youth, until he broke his right hand punching someone in the face with his bare fist when he was 21. One of the Life Magazine photos was a full page photo of him in just his boxing shorts, smiling and looking handsome and charming with his hands taped and ready for a match.
I was told that photo was encouraged by the notoriously homosexual FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who collected shirtless photos of his colleagues, and allegedly had FBI surveillance recordings of Marylin Monroe with President Kennedy, Martin Luther King with a mistress, and practically every senator and supreme court judge doing something they would be embarrassed to become public. For whatever reason, one of the Abrams kept it lying around with a stack of old newspapers. Like Lea’s house, the Abrams had partially finished projects lying around everywhere, but in a more book-and-paper form; there were stacks of sheet music, a word processor, a Macintosh and a PC, a painting easel, and a newfangled type of white board that used pens instead of chalk.
Lea shrugged and said that she’d keep visiting the Abrams’s house when she was in town.
I couldn’t imagine a better family to join for my final year of high school. It was the end of summer, with long days of sunlight and hot, muggy weather that beckoned days of leisure. and I had a few weeks of nothing to do but enjoy time with people I loved. In the end, that’s all Uncle Bob would have wanted.
I started my senior year fall of 1989. The only people who knew I was emancipated were Judge Bob, my mom, the recruiter, the Abrams, Lea’s family, and The Atomic Dogs. I asked them to keep it a secret, because I was unsure if being emancipated affected my sports eligibility, not just because I was a legal adult, but because to wrestle your parents had to have health insurance and I had been using my mom’s insurance; I was unsure if being emancipated severed those links, too.
And friends were there when family was not, I said to Mrs. Abrams one day when just the two of us were home. I told her about my summer with Uncle Bob and what my mom had said.
She didn’t say anything, nor did she ask about my family. But she listened. She was a bit taller than I was and slightly pudgy with thick round tortoise shell glasses, and she wore subdued flowery dresses that practically advertised she was an elementary school teacher. When she listened she leaned in with her whole heart, and her kind eyes relaxed behind her thick glasses and made her seem like an owl, patiently waiting for you to get to your point.
She said I was wise to see the value of friendship, and that she had a book for me to read.
She reached up a bit higher than I could and picked a small paperback book from one of their living room bookshelves that had been published that year by the poet and minister, Hugh Prather. It was a simple book compared to the several leather bound bibles that were on the same shelf, aligned to the left of her collection of poetry and literature books she hadn’t read yet. For a math teacher, she seemed to focus more on poetry than algebra, which seemed odd; but I had never lived with a teacher, so I didn’t know what was normal for any teacher, much less a math one. She handed it to me.
I took the book from her hand. Its humble title page, printed with simple black font on an off white cover, said: “Notes on Love and Courage.”
Mrs. Abrams let me flip through it. I had never seen a book with only a few lines on some pages since my emancipation paperwork. She took it from me and looked in the index, opened it to what she found, and handed it back to me. What I read resonated so much that I memorized it that week, and I can type it from memory 40 years later. It said:
Interests change.
Friendship based on mutual interests in doomed. Real friendship is an unshakable faith in what was once truly seen, no matter how recently or long ago.
She said I could keep it. I accepted, She then reached up and pulled down another book, “The Chosen,” by Chaim Polluck.
“Here, Magik,” she said. “I think you’ll enjoy this one. It’s about the friendship of two boys in New York.”
I accepted it, too. We spent the rest of the afternoon chatting like old friends. I read more books that summer than I had my entire life.
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