Wrestling Hillary Clinton, Part VII

“Ain’t no white man need to go to jail for anything he did to a negro girl.”

– Unnamed juror explaining why he voted not guilty and freed Big Daddy in Woodville, Mississippi, circa 1945; that’s according to the self-published 2014 memoir, “From My Brother’s Shadow: Douglas Westley Partin Finally Tells His Side of The Story.”

Thanks to Coach, I had developed the strongest cradle in all of southern Louisiana. He taught me the trick at Jesuit over the summer.

When Uncle Bob got sick and Auntie Lo was too sloshed by 3pm every day to drive me anywhere, Coach found a compromise. Once a week, Lea would pick me up at Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo’s and drop me off at Belaire, where Coach would pick me up in his truck. The back would already be full of five gallon buckets of fungicide, a pile of mops, and a couple of big boxes of headgear and old wrestling shoes from kids who donated them after graduating or quitting teams. We’d drive towards New Orleans on I-10, but drop off and weave onto the 80-mile River Road for most of the ride.

“I started a company,” he once told me on the drives; it was one of the few times I remember him telling me something I hadn’t asked. I looked up and paid attention.

I dropped the wadded-up ball of newspaper on the floorboard among a pile of others. Coach had once told the team that he and the other Iowa guys developed grip-strength by wadding up each day’s newspaper, and of course tossing bales of hay and slopping pigs before sunrise. I would go on a run or do some pushups at Belaire before sunrise, because though Lea was picking me up she was doing it after she got off the Gold Club at 4am so I was waiting at Belarie by 5am for Coach to show up at 6. I set the rest of the paper down by my feet; I don’t recall if Big Daddy were in the news that day, but it had been almost every two weeks that his illness and legacy and history of crimes were being mentioned in the Baton Rouge newspaper; on those days, I usually didn’t read it, and I crumpled the one with Partin in the headlines first.

“A small company,” he said. He pushed the turn signal lever up and slowed down and got into the turning lane that would take us to Clinton. He stopped, turned the big truck, and we were slowly accelerating along the smaller road before he continued.

“It let’s me buy equipment at wholesale prices,” he said. “They only sell to companies.”

He kept both hands on the wheel and shrugged and said, “I figured, with a company, I could buy more with the same amount of money.”

“That way,” he said, “I could give more schools what they need.”

We pulled into Clinton’s parking lot and he lowered the gear lever into park, turned off the truck, looked at me, and said, “Rising waters raise all ships.”

He shrugged as if that were all there was to say. We unloaded fungicide and didn’t talk much for a while.

About two hours later, we pulled in to St. Paul’s Middle School, which was in a relatively wealthy suburb of just a bit north of New Orleans and was where Coach’s son, Craig Ketelsen coached. St. Pauls never needed supplies and we never lingered; Coach and Craig would shake and smile and chat a bit, and sometimes Craig would say something towards me, but he was busy with his new family and he and Coach only seemed to meet up irregulary and chat about the Louisiana High School Athletic Association, which, despite being at a middle school, Craig was probably going to start running one day. When they finished, Coach drove about ten minutes away to Jesuit High School, home of the Bluejays.

Jesuit was a massive and ornate Catholic school with three tiers of wrestling teams: first, second, and third string. They were so big they held tournaments with only Bluejays competing for first string. There varsity team was away competing in and winning a few national freestyle tournaments, but their second and third string teams were training all summer in one of their gymnasiums, a wrestling-only room that could have swallowed any one of the Region I schools along the River Road. They had two new Bluejay blue mats permanently laid out, and the ceiling rafters were decorated with rows of state championship titles dating back to practically when Louisiana was still a French colony. 

Their coach, Coach Sam, was as diminutive as Coach but had been a nationally ranked collegiate athlete and still competed in masters-level judo tournaments. He was half Japanese and a bit younger than Coach, and from a distance they were the same height and had a similar stance, relaxed but centered and able to move in any direction at any moment. I never heard what they chatted about, because I was too busy being slaughtered by second-string Bluejays.

I was holding a second-string Bluejay in the cradle as he kicked and kicked, but I was unable to roll him to his back and pin him. I was still squeezing and trying to use muscle I didn’t have. Coach appeared and asked us to hold still.

“Put your left knee here,” he said, pointing to the Bluejay’s lower back.

I did that.

“And plant your foot there,” he said, pointing to a spot on the mat across from my opponent.

“Now push with your foot and pull your hands towards your chest,” he said.

I did, and the Bluejay pivoted on my knee and rolled onto his back; he laughed at how he couldn’t stop it in the way someone laughs on a roller coaster because they feel out of control but safe.

Coach pointed to my clasped hands. “Now move that,” he said, then moved his finger to an empty spot in the air about a foot and a half from my chest, “here.”

I did, and his knee and nose were brought together with no noticeable effort from my arms. His laugh was muffled by his knee pressed against his face. I had defeated my first Bluejay.

On the drive back, Coach moved his right hand off the steering wheel and held it up, not like a handshake, but with his thump pressed against the side. The windows were up because we were driving around 55 miles an hour along I-10 to get home, so it was easy to hear him even though he only glanced at me to see if I were looking before looking back at the road and speaking into the windshield.

“A wrestler looses 15% of their strength with their thumb out,” he said.

He moved his thumb out to emphasize the point.

“To have a stronger grip,” he said, glancing at me, “keep your thumb in.”

His thump slammed back against his first finger.

He put his hand back on the steering wheel and watched the road and hummed softly. I practiced clasping my hands with thumbs by the sides and trying to yank my hands apart by thrusting my elbows away from each other. My grip was noticeably stronger the first time I tried it, a rare instance of instant gratification that’s fun to show freshmen just starting out in wrestling or judo; you can try it right now and learn faster than it took to me to explain it in words.

By the time I won gold at Belaire’s Christmas Invitational, I had pinned around 24 opponents and lost only seven matches; of all the opponents I pinned, about 3/4 were from the cradle, a few with the half-nelson, and one with a throw against a relatively new wrestler who was taller and lankier than I was.

By the time of City finals, I was fasting three days to make weight, and I was relentlessly focused on saving energy by pinning opponents as quickly as possible. Because no one could break my cradle, I focused on taking them down with a shot and locking a cradle as soon as I could wrap my lanky arms around their neck and one leg. But, ironically, I had gotten so good at my single leg shot that I usually took a wrestler down flat, and could slip in a half-nelson like the one that pinned me my first match of 1986 and the match with Hillary four long months earlier. I had finally learned to stop thinking two steps ahead, and simply do the best shot I could and go from there.

On 03 March 1990, the referee stood between Hillary and me on the mat and pointed a hand to the center lines. I put my right foot on the line and so did Hillary. Like a lot of the best wrestlers, he was somewhat ambidextrous; starting on his right foot meant he was going as hard as he could. We squatted into our strongest stances and faced off. He hand’t pinned me since Christmas, but he had beaten me by at least ten points three times, though by fewer pointes each time. I was slowly catching up with him, and this was the first time we’d face off in finals.

All of Baton Rouge seemed to be focused on us and nothing else. The ref asked us to shake hands and we slapped palms, a compromise everyone did rather than grasp hands. The ref rested his whistle between his lips and raised his hand. In my periphery I watched his chest, looking for telltale signs of him compressing his lungs to exhale and giving me a fraction of a second advantage, a form of Todd’s lazy eyes; but mostly I just watched Hillary’s hips.

“Where someone’s hips go, they go,” Coach said.

Head taps and dancing feet are distractions: any shot or throw comes from someone’s center of gravity, and it’s good to know when there’s is higher or lower than yours. My lazy eyes now included the ref and Hillary’s face, but my focus remained on his hips.

The referee dropped his hand and blew his whistle without any hint of it coming, and both Hillary and I were in motion before the whistle’s sound waves reached the top bleachers. We collided so hard that the Baton Rouge High gym rafters rattled. We fought for control, chest to chest and pummeling our hands over each other’s arms, trying to snake an arm deep between their ribs and arm to set up a strike, to use it for a throw or to keep a bit of control as you drop to the hips. Though we were barely moving across the mat, every muscle was firing on full throttle and within thirty seconds we were drenched with sweat and sucking air in and heaving it out in deep breaths.

Hillary kept a tight stance and got in closer to me, using his shorter height to stay low and keep his center of gravity below mine. His hand shot up and behind my head, yanking hard and trying to set me up for a throw; but Coach had taught me how to defend against that.

“Don’t be a headhunter,” he said.

“Use that moment to your advantage,” he continued, “or let go. Don’t grab their head because you don’t know what else to do.”

Hillary yanked down and forwards and I allowed my head to go, but I simultaneously swooped my hips lower and closer to Hillary. My hand was held close to my body to prevent Hillary from catching it, and when I was below his center of gravity it shot forward between his legs and my body followed. My right foot was planted and my right quad was ready to fire, but my hips continued to swing forward and bring my center under his. My head passed his elbows, and I turned my gaze to the sky. I felt the weight of his leg in my arms, and I knew it had broken contact with the mat and that I was about to lift Hillary off the mat.

But it wouldn’t be that easy. His hand moved seamlessly from my neck to over my arm and into my arm pit, locking my arm in place, and he yanked my arm upwards and slammed his foot down, freeing it from my hold and planting it back onto the mat. I dropped back into a pig slop stance and so did he. We were face to face but neither of us backed away.

We circled slowly, sliding our feet across the mat to never have all of our weight on one foot. He tapped towards my head again and I thought I was watching his hips but maybe he moved too quickly, because the next thing I saw was his lower back and I felt my right ankle get snatched by a low single.

I sprawled like the lives of my teammates depended on it. I kicked my legs away from us and forced my chest onto Hillary’s back, but he pulled my ankle closer and closer. My right leg was folded under me and he was bringing his hips closer so that he could finish the takedown. I sprawled and I sprawled again, and then I sprawled again, and Hillary’s head began to lower from the repeated blows against his back and the force of my legs against his strong hands.

I sprawled again, and his head extended over his hips and his nose poked above my right foot. That’s when my right hand made a tight fist and I crossfaced him with the force of God.

Hillary head turned and he was off overstretched. His arms were useless and his grip was weakened. I planted my chest and did a high-leg low-leg, temporarily turning my back to the mat as I swung my right leg high over myself and planted it behind Hillary, then swinging I my left leg low, under my body, flipping my chest back down and ending up on top and behind him. Instantly and automatically, my left hand automatically snaked under his left leg and my right hand wrapped around his neck; I clasped my hands with the left on top and both thumbs held tightly beside the fingers. I felt the padlock clasp, and I held Hillary in my cradle for the first time. I breathed in to prepare for what was about tot happen.

Like a boy named Sue’s dad when Sue finally fought him as an adult, Hillary “kicked like a mule and bit like a crocodile.” He didn’t actually bite, but he definitely kicked like a mule: hard and in rapid secession. He kicked and he kicked again; if I had sprawled with everything I had, Hillary was kicking with everything he had, and he had a lot of leg strength from all of those steps at the state capital. He kicked so frequently that my grip took the brunt of every kick, and he would kick again before I could move my hands away and hobble his leg close to his face.

At first, Hillary’s kicks were what happens when an unstoppable force hits and unmovable object; thunder roared and lightening flashed, but nothing changed. Hillary furiously attacked my grip for the next twenty seconds, and kick by kick my sweaty hands began to slip apart. My left hand was – and is – the weaker of my two hands and it was receiving the full brunt of Hillary’s kicks; my body was biased towards being near Hillary’s head, so my right arm was tucked closer to my body and therefore at an advantage. But soon my right hand was clasped only my left ring and pinky finger as if grasping the handle of a bayonette that you didn’t want to lose in battle; the base of my right thumb pushed against the top half of my left ring finger. He kicked again, and my left thumb slid too far away from my grip to do any good. I squuezed as if someone would die if I let go. He kicked again, and I felt my ring finger snap.

I held on with my right hand, and he kicked again and broke free and stood up and turned to face me with the speed of a mongoose whirling in mid air to face a cobra. I dropped into a pig slop stance and kept wrestling.

We were face to face again, his strongest position, and his bushy eyebrows furrowed with anger. I had never seen him angry on the mat before, and I only had the smallest fraction of a second to realize that before the buzzer sounded. The referee awarded me two points for a takedown him one point for an escape point. I had lost a chance: people make mistakes when they’re angry. One of those Greek philosophers, like Aristotle or Socrates, had said it first, something like: if they gods want to torment someone, they make them angry first.

The ref pointed us to our corners. The scoreboard showed I was up 2-1. I had never be ahead of Hillary before but I didn’t dwell on it. Jeremy was beside Coach and ready with a fresh hand towel. I accepted it with my right hand. My left finger was swelling and was a useless plank. I wiped my face and arms; the towel smelled of fungicide, like everything carried in the back of Coach’s truck.

I wiped the sweat from my eyes, only to have more pour down my forehead, pool in my eyes, and drip off my nose and chin and splash on the mat by my shoes. I alternated between shaking my limbs to stay limber and dabbing sweat off my face. Coach asked, and I said I was fine. I didn’t want to have anyone look at my finger; I wanted to face Hillary while he was still riled and I was calm.

Coach nodded his acorn-shaped head, briefly showing the bald poking through his whispy grey hair, and stepped back. He was so calm there was no hint of him shouting during the last match. I sensed that though I didn’t say anything, he respected that I had stood my ground and not listened to him. It was my match then, this was my match now. I wanted to own it.

I glanced down at the shoes I was wearing, frayed and faded size 12 Asics that used to be white but now a dull gray. They were still tied with a double knot. In my younger days, I did not double-knot them because, like a lot of wrestlers, I’d pause between matches and tell the ref I had to tie my shoe. I had developed the knack of quickly and secretly untying them like a magician doing a rope trick, just to give me a few extra seconds to catch my breath. I started tying double knots Christmas, because I realized I was in better shape than most and I wanted to use that to my advantage; it was only a coincidence that I needed a size larger shoe and Coach lent me an old pair of Craig’s from when Craig was Belaire’s state champion in the early 80’s.

I loved those shoes, not because they had been Craig’s or because Coach gave them to me, but because they fit perfectly. I hadn’t known shoes could matter so much. They fit snugly but did not restrict like my size 11 had, and the rubber on the bottom gripped the mat as tenaciously as Coach griped a tricep; but the sides, worn smooth by Craigs dragging them across the mat in thousands of shot drills and by me shooting a few hundred more, slid like a hockey puck across ice and gave precious moments of advantage. Several times I scored a shot, I had been so close to failing that I attributed the minute advantage of Craig’s old Asics. Even if I had the money for a new pair, it would have taken them an entire season to approach the fit of those old Tigers.

The knots were sound. I moved up and down on the balls of my feet, and shook my arms and wiggled my legs and dotted the sweat off my forehead with the now drenched towel. My breath whooshed in and out through pursed lips while I stared at Capital’s corner, hoping for a glimpse of the strategy he’d apply in our next round. Two of the maroon hooded Lions dried each of Hillary’s arms while he bounced and shook his limbs like a mirror image of me.

The referee called to us only a few brief seconds after we had ended the first round. I trotted back to the center of the mat. There would be a coin toss and one of us would choose top, bottom, or neutral. I won the coin toss, which wasn’t a coin but a red and green disc. I don’t recall which color I was – they changed every match. I did not glance at Coach for guidance. This was my match. Hillary was so much stronger in neutral that I’d never choose that. He had just proven that he could break my cradle from the bottom, and my cradle, the strongest weapon I had on top, was now useless. I chose down.

The ref motioned and I got down on all fours but with my chest held high, like the Bulldog mascot painted around Baton Rouge High’s campus. I sat low on my ankles and tucked my big feet under me to restrict Hillary’s hands from grabbing them. I stopped moving and the ref gestured to Hillary, and he got behind me and clamped my right tricep with his right hand, planted a foot behind me, and wrapped his left arm around my waist.

Hillary had switched sides. He could wrestle as if he were left or right handed, though his right was stronger. It didn’t matter to me. I knew I couldn’t sit-out or reverse Hillary; I had tried many times, and it wasn’t my strongest moves. I was pretty good at most bottom moves and I would use them to get two-point reversals when I felt I could, but mostly I stood up for a one-point escape and I knew I could sometimes do that against the best wrestlers in the state. I would have been stronger if he had clasped my left tricep; my muscle memory was stronger against right-handed wrestlers, because that’s how I trained 90% of the time. But it didn’t matter for what I had planned, which wasn’t a plan as much as it was a decision: I would stand up.

I learned how to stand up the first time I saw Coach wrestle, which was the first day I met him and before I had a waiver to compete. Steve manhandled Ben onto the mat and pinned him when Coach was watching, and Ben said there was nothing he could have done. Coach asked them to get back down, flat on the mat.

“Just stand up!” Coach told Ben.

Ben tried again and Steve flipped him again.

Ben said Steve Long was too strong; that was what we called Steve, Steve Long, and we all knew Steve Long was strong. But Coach may not have known that, and he reiterated to Ben: “Just stand up.”

“Here,” Coach said, “watch.”

He gestured to the football cage and a few big players came out.

Big D was the first. Marcus Spears followed; he made Big D look tiny. To put into perspective how big and strong Marcus was, he was Belaire’s star player, and in another year would play for the all-African American Southern University and be an all-American, switch to LSU and become a national top draft pick and play pro for the Dallas Cowboys; he would retire and become a sportscasing celebrity, just like Shaquelle Oneal and other aging athletes. But he started as a football player when Coach was an assistant football coach.

Clint Osborne joined Marcus and Big D. He was a giant when standing next to me, but he looked tiny next to them. Clint was a brute who could thrown Steve Long around. He looked fierce, and he sported a mohawk and was known to plow through a line of defense like they were a mist of annoying mosquitos in his way of wherever he wanted to be.

Once, to prove a point about how wrestling techniques were for people who don’t try hard enough, Clint shot on Big D and scored a double. Big D sprawled, but Clint just drove him forward as if Big D were just a football dummy on treads being pushed across a field. He slowed down but did not stop, and he pushed Big D across the mat and against the gym wall. Clint’s shoulder dug so deep into Big D’s belly that you couldn’t see his bicep, and he grunted and rammed D again and again. Despite Big D’s belly taking the brunt of force, Clint’s head hit the wall with every surge but didn’t seem to notice. Big D finally quit. Clint let him go and stood up straight and smiled and said, “See?”

Clint, Marcus, and Big D were massive compared to Coach, but he plopped face down on the mat and asked them and Big Ben pile on top of him. Big Ben weighed around 180 back then. Combined, there was probably 800 pounds piled on top of Coach.

He glanced up at us from under the pile of bodies and said, “Just stand up.”

“But,” he said. “Look how I landed. I’m still in shoveling stance.”

His right leg was pulled up high and his left leg was slightly bent. He was right, he looked like he took his stance and laid down in it.

“You could spread pig slop all day in this stance,” he said.

“Now,” he said, “just stand up over your foot.”

In one fluid motion, Coach stood up and the mountain crumbled into a pile almost as tall as Coach himself. He asked them to pile on again, and he repeated how easy it was to just stand up.

Marcus, Clint, and Big D went back to the weight room, and the wrestling team returned to training. I stood there, dumfounded. To be fair, I may have been so dumfounded that I remember the event wrong. Decades later, when writing this, I’d email Marcus and ask him and he’d say he didn’t remember that day; but, Ben, Steve, and D remembered it like I said, so it’s possible that we all remembered Marcus and saw his rise to fame and attached ourselves to his journey somehow, or that the event was a relatively minor one in Marcus’s career and didn’t take up space in his memories of Belaire. I like my version, because it points to how flawed all memories can be, which is why a memoir is a best attempt rather than a perfect record.

I prepared to stand up. Hillary prepared to either push me down or to let me stand up and then take me down to my back for a pin, a strategy I had used on other wrestlers and learned by watching Hillary and The Mountain’s strategy. I would worry about the next step after I stood up.

The whistle blew, and I punched my right hand towards the sky and let my body follow. I punched past my head and through the Bulldog’s rafters and out of Baton Rouge High’s domed gym and through the clouds; if there were a heaven, angels would see my fist flying past them and with no indication of slowing down.

Simultaneously, my right foot slid forward and planted on the mat and my left hand snapped to grasp Hillary’s hand; I caught it in the crotch of my thumb and first finger, which I would have done even if the ring finger were not broken, and pushed down and away. Had he been on the other side, the only difference is that I would have clasped it with my right hand and held on to set up the next move, but on my weaker side I had trained to stand up and not hold on and pivot away. That’s what I did, and as soon as I was up in stance I pulled my right hand back down from heaven and dropped it to my side, ready for anything.

But Hillary moved so fast that the referee didn’t have time to call my point. Before I could take a breath he stepped in and snagged a bear hug under my arms.

I made fists and pummeling my gnarled knuckles between us and into his rib cage. It was the first time I felt my broken finger spike with enough pain to distract me, and I focused on using my right hand, which was stronger anyway, to force my knuckles down. But Hillary was a beast impervious to pain, and he stepped under me and lifted me into the air and threw me in what was about to become a perfect 360 degree throw.

Hillary’s bear hug had caught me on exhale, when my lungs almost empty, and I was out of breath and trapped in mid-air, weakened like Antaeus lifted from Mother Earth by Hercules. Those Russians were right: I was in Hillary’s control, and there was nothing I could do about it until I was on the ground again.

The ceiling appeared in my view, and above the bleachers I could see the giant Baton Rouge High scoreboard, a late 1970’s giant neon monster with dozens of small orange lightbulbs that spelled out our names and the schools we represented, and with a massive countdown timer so that people as far away as Texas could see how many seconds were left in each round. I watched Craig’s shoes fly through the air, their momentum lagging behind my knees just a bit.

The shoes moved between my eyes and the scoreboard and blocked the lights for a moment, then Hillary and my names came into view again. The shoes arced back down and I saw the bleachers again. Faces of fans staring wide-eyed in awe, and some were applauding because it was a beautiful throw. Some, probably those experienced with wrestling, cringed, because they knew I was about to hit the mat with the full force of Hillary following.

He slammed my shoulders to the mat with a thud that shook the bleachers as if a C-130 Hercules had dropped a 15,000 pound bomb in the gymnasium. The impact sent a shock wave that reverberated back from the bleachers, and I felt that, too. Had I wind left in me, it would have bellowed out. Everything went dark, but my body acted on its own and bridged as quickly as Hillary had moved earlier. My feet planted the rubber soles of Craig’s Tigers flat on the rubber mat, and my long lever legs pushed with everything they had. My eyes, now seeing light after the shockwave dissipated, stared to the trellised roof high above the gym floor. I tried to breathe but could not. I was arched like the Mississippi River Bridge, and probably just as strong.

I had escaped the pin. If I had paused with my shoulders on the mat a fraction of a second longer, the ref would have called Hillary in control and I would have lost then. I was spared, and a new battle was beginning.

Hillary squeezed his massive hairy arms with the patience of a boa constrictor, bit by bit, waiting for the slightest exhale or wiggle to squeeze a bit more and kill his prey. His tightening was controlled, calm, and deadly, a disciplined and dispassionate sniper who took calculated shots at the peak or valley of breaths. I tried force my right hand between our chests, making a tight fist so that its gnarly knuckles would rasp across his rib cage and cause enough pain for him to loosen his hold, but he took advantage of my wiggles to pull his body closer to my spine, compressing my ribs even more. I was burning precious fuel and my bridge began to buckle, so I stopped fighting and focused on saving energy. Had I asked, I’m sure Lea would have told me I made the river face again.

I couldn’t move. Frozen in space, I stared at the clock. There was almost a minute left. I could see Coach and Jeremy watching me in silence. Behind them I saw Paige and a gaggle of blue-hooded Bengals violating rules by leaving the bleachers and inching close behind our corner. I didn’t pray. Like I said, I’ve never been a religious person, and thinking takes up energy better spent wrestling, even if wrestling motionlessly and fighting an internal battle. I put everything I had into bridging and waited.

I could feel and see, but no air was coming into my nose for me to smell anything. I couldn’t smell the fungicide, which I had smelled earlier and would still have been fresh after the mat was cleaned for finals. Nor could I smell Hillary any longer. His body odor was astringent, like burnt roux at the bottom of a cast iron skillet or black tea burnt on an electric stove. He had thrown me in a headlock at the Lee Invitational only a few weeks before, and his armpit had smothered my nose for forty seconds as I gulped breaths and kept fighting. It’s a smell you never forget. I had held off then and lost by points. I could hold off again, and then fight another battle in the next round.

The absence Hillary’s familiar pungency was just as a strong in my mind. I knew I couldn’t breath. I didn’t know how long I could last. I was always a weak swimmer mostly because never could hold my breath long, probably because I had weak technique and over-exhausted myself, and though swimming was constant motion, it was nothing compared to the muscles firing just to keep me stationary while Hillary squeezed and arced all his weight to push my head and shoulders down. I tried to relax any muscle not being used to keep my bridge.

In my periphery, gathered in the public space behind Coach and Jeremy, about half of Belaire’s team gathered to watch, a few of them knowing me since middle school, too. If there were such a thing as psychic energy, I felt it radiating from them, trying to send me some of their strength when I needed it. Then I saw a group of six wrestlers gather in white shirts beside the Bengals.

They were the all-city wrestlers from the previous summer freestyle camp, the same ones who wrestled on the all-Louisiana team during summer junior olympics. Like I remembered from middle school, the all-city wrestlers all wore different colored hoodies to represent their teams, but now I knew that they were aligned with the sport of wrestling more than any color. Six of them gathered behind the blue hooded Belaire Bengals, all wearing the same white t-shirt over their different colored hoodies. Only Chris Forest, heavyweight for the Baton Rouge High Bulldogs, wasn’t wearing one, because he couldn’t squeeze his broad torso into an XXL. Next to Chris and two feet shorter was Clothodian Tate, the Bulldog’s captain and 136 pound champion, a wrestler just as terse as Hillary but with a perpetual smile and generous hand at helping others.

The summer before, Clodi’s dad, a minister, found the t-shirts in a Christian supplies store under the I-110 overpass near LSU, just were it branches off of I-10 and where a few small shops sprouted up under the rumble of Teamster trucks overhead. The shirts were simple white shirts printed with Ephsians 6:12 in an unremarkable font, but the message wasn’t about religion for most of us, it was about wrestling. It said:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

My flesh was out of oxygen, but my body somehow kept wrestling with whatever fuel was left for it to fight against darkness. Gradually, the guys in my corner began to fade into one dark grey blur, and the clock became a single spot of fuzzy orange light at the end of my tunneled vision. No sound from the gym reached my mind’s ear; but in it, I heard the slow opening lyrics of Lunatic Fringe:

Lunatic fringe
I know you’re out there…

The song at that line, like my energy at that moment, drifted away silently. The acne on my back protruded further than my tight singlet and I could feel the bumps contact the mat and push against my skin. The orange light dimmed and then vanished, but I saw the referee’s blurry face when he slid beside my head with his whistle pinched between his lips, and I felt my skin contact the rubber mat. I heard a whistle and the slap of a hand against the mat. My vision quest was over. Hillary Clinton had won.

We stood up and the referee raised Hillary’s hand. The applause and stampeding of feet on the bleachers shook the gym more than the bomb that had gone off earlier. It was a beautiful throw and Hillary earned his win.

The Louisiana High School Athletic Association recorded that he pinned me at 3:40, twenty seconds to go in the second round, and those records persist in LHSAA.org archives for the world to know that Hillary won the gold, and that Clodi won most outstanding wrestler using the same ranked voting system Coach used for captain. No one argued that the Bulldog’s captain deserved that honor among a gym full of outstanding wrestlers; in two years of sparing with him, I never once scored on Clodi. He was perpetually calm and cordial; he did not wrestle against flesh and blood. Had he been ten pounds heavier, I suspect he could have defeated Hillary in what would have been the world’s most silent yet brutal battle.

I walked to Belaire’s corner. Coach stuck out his right hand and took mine. His other stubby but ridiculously strong hand reached up and clasped my left tricep. He looked up into my eyes, his squat but unflappable stance now permanent part of how he stood, and he said: “Good job, Magik.”

Jeremy offered me a fresh hand towel. He was a man of few words but of kind actions who never agreed with the team’s decision to make me co-captain, but he stood up and offered the chair next to Coach. Surprised, I accepted the towel and sat down. He had nothing to prove with his gesture; he was the champion, not I. Jeremy stepped behind me and into the corner that was now empty; a quick glance let me see our team back in the bleachers with their parents, and I turned around and sat beside Coach. Another wrestler was on deck. I had a job to do, and nothing else mattered for the next six minutes.

Later that day, a few of us were helping the Bulldogs clean up their gym. I couldn’t help much, because my finger had a splint from the medic and I had kept a bag of ice from the concession stand on it for an hour or so. Instead, I stared at the blank clock, powered off but still foreboding if only because of it’s bulk handing over our heads.

My vision quest had ended, and I had won. It wasn’t about winning. Of course the guy in Vision Quest won; that was a movie. In real life, a lot of the most memorable wins in life follow losses on the mat, just like Coach becoming a better person after Doug defeated him. I finally saw that. No one had died, and we still had tomorrow; in the end, that’s all anyone I’ve ever known really wanted.

I heard laugher I recognized, and in my periphery I saw Pat, a former Bulldog heavyweight and now their assistant coach, standing with a few other coaches and Andy and Timmy, who had known Pat from when they all trained at the all-city camp before my time as a wrestler. They were laughing with a small group of other old-timers with Pat, who volunteered at the downtown camp and who, like Chris Forest, couldn’t squeeze into an XXL shirt.

“Hillary stuck Magik so hard,” Pat said in a playful tone, “the only thing he could wiggle was his eyeballs.”

Pat wiggled his eyeballs and everyone laughed; he set up that joke every time someone was pinned. I had seen him do it a million times. I would have laughed again, too, had I not been so focused on the timer. I was thinking about how it faded from my vision, and wondering how I was unable to remember the exact moment I stopped being able to see it. I stared at the clock and wondered how much of my body acted on its own, habit and conditioning rather than thought. I looked down at the ice pack wrapped on my hand, and wondered if I’d be able to wrestle in regionals, and I scanned the empty bleachers and wondered if it mattered.

The laughter dissipated and the gaggle of wresters and coaches parted. In my periphery, I saw Pat’s smile go away. He leaned down and softly asked Coach:

“What happened? Magik almost had him pinned. He was focused all season. It looked like he gave up. Is he okay?”

Coach said that I had a lot on my mind, that my grandfather was sick. Then he slid his reading glasses from around his neck and put them on the tip of his nose, glanced down at the clipboard he always carried, and waddled away to help someone do something.

Pat didn’t know what to say. Everyone had seen the news that my grandfather was not expected to live much longer. After the New Year he was confined to a nursing home and was being cared for by his daughter, my Aunt Janice. Pat had forgotten. He glanced at me, then turned towards where Coach had gone and hustled off after him.

My grandfather died a week later.

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