Wrestling Hillary Clinton: The Abrams

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 next two weeks were blissful. Lea and I drove around town in her dad’s van, played on the old state capital’s hill, and frolicked in the downtown government building’s fountain after hours. She took me to the DMV to get my driver’s license, and I practiced driving the old Chevy along the relatively empty River Road leading away from LSU. 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. Todd was in Belaire’s theater department, which always sought to get work around films, but that industry had dried up since Everybody’s All American; the rumor was that with Big Daddy in jail and Doug not as forceful of a Teamster leader, Baton Rouge was loosing its role with Hollywood. Todd’s plan was to graduate and head to Hollywood.

The Abrams’s house was immaculately clean despite being 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 we realized we couldn’t cut the shell with throwing knives, we sharpened them to a razor’s edge, which is how Big Daddy kept his elk-hunting knife all the time.

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 inventor of Aikido, Morihei Ueshi.”

“It’s the physical embodiment of Buddhism,” he said as if he knew what he was talking about.

Todd talked about a lot of things and could 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. An advantage of wrestling compared to other martial arts is that you can give it your all, all the time, and when people just spare they get used to stopping at a point of uncertainty and watch videos to imagine what they would do next time. But some things you don’t learn just by watching, you have to do it again and again and develop muscle memory. That takes discipline, and as knowledgable as Todd was, he lacked discipline; that’s why he had quit wrestling the year before, and though I never told him so, it was why he would probably end up in Hollywood as just another waiter hoping for a big break. If I had learned anything from wrestling, it was that luck came to those who trained the hardest.

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 Lea 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, a Baton Rouge knife throwing club, and traveled to Houston every few weeks to train with some old-school knife guru. His grandparents, Jack and Joyce, whom everyone called Opa and Oma, lived in Houston and were coincidentally near Mamma Jean; though they didn’t know it, they shared a church with her, one of those Houston mega-buildings with thousands of people inside on Sundays. Todd would go back and forth in one of the Abrams’s cars, but we’d never talk much about what he learned while there. In Baton Rouge, I’d share tips from my grandfather with Todd, 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. When he reported in to his Houston guide, they worked with what I mentioned, and Todd came back better than ever. One of his signature throws became a sideways fling that stuck the knife in sideways.

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. Seeing him do all of that, I would realize that dedication doesn’t have to be to all things, just to those things that mean the most to us.

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 new type of chalkboard that used pens instead of chalk, called a whiteboard.

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. I hadn’t told anyone everything yet, other than Lea who had witnessed the process for two yeras, and I must have gushed, because I didn’t stop talking for almost twenty minutes. I ended up telling her the story I’ve written so far, except, obviously, for the parts about Todd eventually earning his livelihood as a knife thrower within a few years, and about me being in the first Gulf war, which was still ten months away and on no one’s radar yet.

Mrs. Abrams didn’t say anything, 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. There was nothing about Hoffa or Kennedy on her shelf. She handed the small paperback to me and I focused on it; the humble title page, printed with simple black font on an off white cover, said: “Notes on Love and Courage.”

I had never seen a book with only a few lines on some pages since my emancipation paperwork. I flipped through, not knowing what to look for. There was no index to look up Big Daddy’s name, and usually teachers tell you what to look for when you get a book. She saw my confusion, took the book and flipped to a page she knew from memory, and handed it back.

It was a mostly blank page, with practically the same number of words as my emancipation paperwork. What I read resonated so much that I memorized it that week, and I can type it from memory 40 years later:

Interests change.

Friendship based on mutual interests is 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. We spent the rest of the afternoon chatting like old friends.

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