Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part III

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

The day was already hot and muggy when I walked out of the East Baton Rouge Parish courthouse as an adult on paper.

Lea was finally awake and more like herself. When I approached her van, she looked up from a half of a po’boy. It had a bite taken out, and she smiled without opening her mouth.

I climbed into her van and she slid the other half to me. I began to devour my half while it was still warm.

I used my tongue to scrub the bits of French bread stuck in the metal braces across the front of my teeth behind my closed lips, swallowed, and showed her my emancipation paperwork.

“It’s a legal piece of paper that doesn’t fit in a legal sized envelop,” I mumbled; my hand was in front of my mouth, and I kept my lips partially closed because there was probably white bread chunks stuck in my braces.

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 held out the case. I shoved the last chunk of po’boy in my mouth and took the cassette and looked at it while I chewed a bite that was too big to swallow any time soon.

It was Appetite for Destruction, 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 finally swallowed the last bite and felt the still massive chunk force its way down my gullet.

Lea lit a cigarette and said without emotion but with the conviction of her words: “I love this band.”

“Guns-N-Roses,” she said. “Just listen…”

She pushed play and rolled her window down more to let out more of the smoke for my sake.

She smiled as mychieviously as Chesire Cat, which was another one of the outfits she sometimes wore at The Gold Club, because she was realizing it fit her personality more than Slave-Lea. She reached over 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.

Instantly, I leaned in to Guns-N-Roses. Lea put the van in gear as she nodded “yeah, it’s good,” and we left the courthouse and rocked out on the way to the recruiter’s office on Government Boulevard.

The office was squeezed between a Pay-Day loan business and a convenience store that sold mostly booze, cigarettes, and lottery tickets that were used to pay for part of Louisiana’s education system in lieu of taxes. The recruiter was waiting for me.

The only requirement for the army’s delayed entry contract was to do ten pushups. That was easy, and all summer long at the hospital and then at Uncle Bob’s house I had been practicing one-handed pushups like how Rocky did them in Rocky III or IV or whichever was in theaters around that time. But, he said that I didn’t have to do even the required two-handed ones.

I dropped and did them, anyway, because I could and because it was a way to get in a bit of extra exercise in an otherwise wasted day. As a compromise, I did them on the two punching knuckles of both hands, like I learned from Todd’s Ku-Kempo training, aligning the knuckles, hand bones, and wrist bones in straight line.

Like most wrestlers who trained in the summer, I was in remarkable shape. Coach had advised summer and fall cross-country track for anyone wanting to get in shape for winter wrestling, and I did that and practiced with the Bealaire swim team using Catholic’s pool. I was a slightly above average runner, though an abysmal swimmer who would sink and wasn’t competing in tournaments and therefore didn’t letter, but got in better shape from going to practice twice a week. A year after signing my delayed entry contract, I would easily pass basic training, advanced infantry training, and Airborne school, a sentiment echoed by every wrestler I met in service over the next few years.

I walked out of the recruiter’s office twenty minutes after entering with a contract in my hands. It was 1/3 the size of what I had signed, because the original had three carbon copies layered between each page: I had the original, the recruiter’s office kept one copy, and, I guessed, generals at the Pentagon received the third and would be looking for 16 year olds who knew they wanted to serve with the best. I climbed in Lea’s van with the paper still in my hand.

“It’s not a real contract,” I told her, holding up the very official looking document. “It just guarantees I go to the 82nd if I sign the real one before basic.”‘

I have to pass Airborne school,” I said, “But I should be ready by then.”

“And,” I added proudly, “Because I signed it now, I’ll start basic training as an E2, which means $75 more a month!”

Lea smiled and remained silent. She had been making more than $75 a night in tips on weeknights, and around $300 a night on Friday and Saturday nights, which is how she had been splurging on new cassettes instead of bootleg ones. She had saved enough to buy a nice used car for her commute to Southeaster in Hammond, and she was shopping around and planned to spend $4,000 in cash on something reliable and low on gas mileage.

To me, $75 was more than I’d make in a month of hustling magic shows or a weekend of performing near the New Orleans French Quarter hoping for tips; being guaranteed that every month for something I wanted to do, anyway, sounded like a great deal.

“He didn’t care that I could do the ten pushups one-handed,” I said.

She shrugged as if that weren’t important to her, and I silently agreed it wasn’t important to me, either. I slid my contract into the manila folder, which was now so full it bulged like my belly after a whole po’boy.

“He had one of those cheesy photos of Uncle Sam on his desk,” I said for no reason at all other than it seemed odd.

Lea looked at me without knowing where I was going.

I shrugged and said, “It was the one from World War II, where he looks like the 4th of July and is pointing at you and saying ‘Uncle Sam wants you to join the U.S. Army.”

I pointed to emphasize how weird it looked to be pointed at, lowered my finger, shrugged again, and said, “It just seemed funny to have on his desk in 1989.”

Lea shrugged back and picked up a a new, color copy of Metalica’s “And Justice for All.”

She dropped the And Justice for All case onto the center console beside a new pack of Malboro Red cigarettes, and she said she put a six pack of Milwaukee’s Beast – which is what we called the cheap but effective Milwaukee’s Best – in the hard shelled Igloo cooler she kept in her van for that reason.

She winked seductively to point out the humor in her choice, partly because of the name, and partly because the album cover showed a fallen blind lady of justice holding scales, and Lea always said that because I was a Libra I was going to shake up the legal system. She slid the cassette into her tape deck.

She lit a cigarette and pulled out of the strip mall parking lot just as Mars Ulrich’s drums kicked in and James Hetfield’s guitar ripped a beat I’d lift weights to. The guitar ramped up faster and faster, and James Hetfield’s raspy voice ripped into “Blackened,” and we rocked out all the way down Government Street.

She finished her cigarette a few minutes before we arrived at my orthodontist office; Blackened was almost at the end of it’s nine-and-a-half or so relentless minutes; my heartbeat was up.

I stood outside and let my breath settle, then walked inside. The orthodontist was old and had taken Wendy’s braces off some time during when I was in the foster system. He asked where she was. I whipped out my emancipation paperwork and said she didn’t have to be there, and that I would like my braces removed.

He reminded me that I needed to wear them at least a year and a half to two years more, and that my mom had spent a lot of money on them, but I insisted and said I wanted to wrestle without a suffocating mouth guard, and that I’d be leaving for the army soon, anyway, and wouldn’t be able to return. He acquiesced but I didn’t feel the victory you’d imagine; I had always thought that I never needed braces, and that when I was 13 Wendy listened to him speculate that I would need them, and because she knew that her teeth turned out fine and helped her be more confident smiling, and that she didn’t know that when she was 13 and begrudgingly got metal glued to her teeth. I felt that she was probably projecting onto me, and I wanted the braces off so I could breathe more easily when wrestling.

I brushed my teeth with a toothbrush and toothpaste his office assistant gave me, and two hours and forty five minutes later I walked out moving my lips like mule trying to reach out and eat an apple. I hadn’t had that much freedom in three years. They let me keep the toothbrush and tube of toothpaste which was useful, because I had left mine in someone’s house the past few days and couldn’t recall where.

Lea was listening to Guns-N-Roses again. She pushed pause when I stepped in and I made a mule-lip face to show my smooth teeth. Though I had smoked with her in the ninth and tenth grade, I had stopped when I started wrestling and that’s probably why you couldn’t see white squares across the front of my darker teeth, like with a few of Lea’s coworkers at The Gold Club.

She said removing my braces were like cutting her Princess Lea chain, a symbol of emancipation from someone else controlling my life. I disagreed and reiterated what I told the orthodontist. She raised one eyebrow and cocked that eye towards me as if to say, “Are you sure?” I made the mule lips again, and she leaned over and we kissed for the first time without my braces getting in the way; it felt good and I felt vindicated.

We finally stopped and I glanced at my watch – one of those Casio calculator watches I used to cheat on math tests – and said it had taken longer at the orthodontist than I thought. I had missed cross-country track practice. She suggested we watch the sun set over the levy and I said that sounded great. She pushed play, lit a cigarette, and we took off.

We were back downtown a few minutes after Lea put her cigarette butt in the ashtray. She parked along the levee in front of the old state capital building and we carried the Igloo up the 30 foot hill and sat in the shade of a massive sprawling Stately Oak tree draped in Spanish Moss.

Lea knew I stopped drinking the week after I lost my virginity to her, but she still held out her hand and raised her eyebrow and cocked her head towards me. After all it was, she said silently, my first day as an adult. I declined and she must have suspected I would, because she showed that the six pack was really a four-pack with two Cokes she had bought for me (she had drank two of the Beasts while waiting for me at the orthodontists).

But I told her I had given up sugar, too. It felt good to say no to Coke, which was so ubiquitous in the south. I told that I had read one of Coach’s olympic training magazines that expounded on the dangers of simple carbohydrates like the sugar in Coke (this was before Coke used the even worse for you high-fructose corn syrup). It said that sugar causes crashes in performance for the short-term, and can lead to diabetes in the long-term. I wanted to wrestle and train at my best short-term, and I knew that Big Daddy had been released from prison because he was sick with diabetes, and that he looked like a deflated shell of what he had been when he left for his Texas penitentiary and I didn’t want to end up like that, so I stopped drinking Cokes despite being practically addicted to them and still craving one every few hours.

Declining a Coke made me feel good, and I told Lea why.

“Granny said something the other day that made sense,” I said.

Lea popped the tab on her beer raised her eyebrows to say she was interested. Without breaking eye contact, she dropped the tab into the can and put a little dent under the beer can’s hole to make a tiny levee inside that slowed down the flow and made it a sipping beer, and to reduce the likelihood of choking on the tab like some guys did when funneling beer. She took sip and I talked.

“Her face was all covered in lines they used to set up her radiation treatments.”

I waved my hand around my face to show what that looked like.

“But she still had a tallboy of Scotch on the rocks in her hand and kept trying to take a sip.”

I paused and let that sink in: Lea knew that Granny was in her second round of radiation and chemo for throat cancer from smoking a pack of Kents every day.

“She couldn’t sip the Scotch without her face cringing and spitting it back out,” I said. “She said still wanting a drink is how she finally realized she was an alcoholic.”

I paused to let that sink in, too.

“She said that before she died, she wanted to be free from wanting a drink.” I pointed at an imaginary liquor cabinet on the ground, like the one Lea saw at Granny’s floor, and said, “She said that’s why she kept bottles at home; she said that until she has them nearby and still doesn’t crave one, she’s still an alcoholic. She wants to die free.”

“Hmmm.” Lea said as stared across the river and sipped her Beast.

“Look at that sunset,” she said, pointing an eyebrow across the river.

Most kids in the know know to go to the old state capital for romantic sunsets, where orange and red rays of sunlight glitter in the humidity and reflect off the steam drifting down from chemical alley factories. The serpentine Mississippi River makes a rare straight section in Baton Rouge, which is probably why they put a port there, and it happens to form an almost perfect North-South line with Baton Rouge on the east and the tiny Port Allent on the west, connected by the I-10 bridge that spanned more than a half mile across the Mighty Mississippi River.

A few other small ports line the east bank downstream of Baton Rouge, whose bridge blocks larger ships from going farther north. The first was the cement-factory town of Plaquemine, where Big Daddy and Doug shot the managers who wouldn’t switch to using Teamster labor, and a handful of other working class hamlets on the meandering 88 mile route to New Orleans. I had spent the summer wrestling a few kids in those tiny towns, and most of us took the River Road when we went to New Orleans for a weekend night.

Most kids in the know know to go to the old state capital for romantic sunsets, where orange and red rays of sunlight glitter in the humidity and reflect off the steam drifting down from chemical alley factories. 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.

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.

Lea finished her beer and lit another cigarette.

“Coach gave us marriage advice,” I said, practicing talking without braces.

Lea raised her eyebrows.

I pointed my forefinger towards heaven 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.”

I leaned toward Lea and stared the way Coach did until we all had eye contact. She looked, and I relaxed and said:

“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.”

I lowered my finger and Lea cocked her head as if expecting more.

“Why’d he say that?” she asked.

I said I wasn’t sure. Coach said a lot of things I remembered but never understood.

“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 Lea’s mother was Japanese, which is why Lea looks so exotic; her grandparents had been detained in California’s Manzanar detention camp with Lea’s then three-year old mother; her father met her mother when he out-processed from the navy in San Diego. Because of Japanese culture and Baton Rouge’s anti-Asian undercurrent, Lea preferred that no one knew, so I practiced my Miranda Rights when anyone asked. And only I knew that Lea had developed her enviable breasts younger than most girls, and had always attracted boys with her exotic looks; when she was 12 years old, she was raped a boyfriend who had a car and seemed cool at the time.

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

Lea cocked her head; she was very interested in how boys who couldn’t dance earned their living. Andy and Tim were paternal twins who wrestled the year before, but had had dropped out of school and gotten their GED’s. The oil industry wasn’t hiring, and all of the trucking jobs were only for Teamsters; but heir dad, who was a Vietnam infantry veteran and bigger and meaner than Andy and Tim combined, would fight to prevent them from becoming Teamsters.

I never learned why or what their dad did to learn his livelihood, but I assumed he worked at the Plaquimine cement factories that had lost a few battles with Big Daddy’s Teamsters. To resist unions from organizing in their factories, managers hired the biggest, angriest, well-trained and well-armed unemployed World War II and Korean War veterans they could find, and pitted them against Big Daddy and his Teamsters and suffered defeat after defeat. After Plaquimine lost the war, none of the survivors ever spoke ill about my family in public. The twins were a lot like their father, and they never could maintain a job.

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 gently said, “I’ll never forget what Uncle Bob said to me before he died.”

My eyes closed and my lip began to quiver.

“He smirked from his bed and said, ‘when life hands you lemons, make a whisky sour.'”

My teeth clenched.

“He said he’d die with no regrets.”

I clenched harder.

She sighed a sigh more subtle than the b in subtle, and said: “He loved you, you know.”

My chest heaved up and down and I clenched even harder, then the levee broke and I spilled tears down the old state capital hill; Lea quickly squeezed the levee back together and let me sob on her shoulder for a while. I hadn’t cried since Uncle Bob’s funeral, when I broke down in the middle of giving his eulogy to a room full of his family and friends; I never got to tell him what he said he wanted for his funeral, to have someone drive him around in his hearse while it towed a bright orange U-Haul trailer behind, so that his neighbors would say that you really can take it all with you when you go. I had held him by his hand as he went, and nothing followed; all that was left was his sarcastic sense of humor lingering in my memory.

If I had one regret, it was not arguing harder with Wendy, who said she wouldn’t pay to rent a U-Haul, and reminded me in a harsh tone that Uncle Bob was donating his body to science research, and no one was paying for an empty hearse. All that remained was his obituary, which I had clipped from the Baton Rouge Advocate and tucked in my manilla folder, because I didn’t know where else to put it. It said:

Desico, Robert M

Died 4:50 p.m. Tuesday, August 15th, 1989 at his residence in Baton Rouge. He was a native of Canada. Memorial services at St. George Memorial church at 10 a.m. Friday. Survived by his wife, Lois H. Desico; a sister and brother-in-law, Rose D. and Clearance Petiprin, Florida; a niece, Wendy Partin, Baton Rouge; and a great-nephew, Jason Partin, Baton Rouge. Preceeded in death by parents Phillip and Blance Provenceal Desico. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to charity.

Wendy was at his funeral but not his death. Her boyfriend had taken her out to dinner for her birthday the evening before, and she wanted another day to relax and spend time with Mike after work instead of coming over. Auntie Lo was already sloshed, and I was the only one to have spoken with Uncle Bob before he stopped being able to speak a few days before. I knew he was joking, but I thought it would be fun to do, anyway, and I had planned to say at the end of his obituary, it’s what he would have actually enjoyed had he been around to see his hearse towing an equally empty U-Haul.

I recovered as quickly as getting up for the third round of a close match. I felt more relaxed, and Lea was still holding my levee tight even though it was healed for now. I rolled her over my body and onto the grass and I prepared to pin her.

But she was better than you’d imagine, and re-rolled me like I had taught her to counter being pushed onto the ground. I let her win, and she fell on my chest and we laughed a bit. Lea trained with Todd’s mixed martial arts club, and, though she smoked like a Plaquimine cement factory, she stayed in great shape dancing eight hours a few nights a week.

I told her I’d tell the boys she’d be missing a lot of practice.

There was nothing else to talk about. We sat up and silently watched the sky gently burn as the sun set over the Mighty Mississippi. Barges inched up and down more slowly than you’d follow with your eyes. It had been years since I watched a sunset across the Mississippi, and I don’t know why I waited so long.

My first day as an adult was a good day.

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