Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (6 page)

The list goes on, gets longer every year. It never ends. It never gets any shorter. There is always more required of you. That’s another thing Ray Parker Jr. was trying to tell me.

1981

 

 

 

 

My wrestling career record was 0-14, yet I racked up a few moral victories. For instance, there were matches where none of my vertebrae snapped, and a few times there were no loud crunching noises. My mom came to see me wrestle once, and apologized for never being able to go back. I don’t blame her. No Irish mother should ever have to witness her firstborn getting bodyslammed while wearing a plastic mouthguard.

I was a resounding success at wrestling, compared to my utter failure to explain to anyone I’ve met since high school why I was allowed on the wrestling team. When I took my wife, Ally, back to visit my old school, there were all sorts of places I wanted to show her. But the main thing I wanted to show her was the team photo from the 1981 wrestling team, with me beaming proudly in my Lycra unitard and leather codpiece, just so she’d finally believe me. I swear that when I graduated, the photo was still up there, framed and hanging in Warren Hall. But now it’s locked up in a closet somewhere, perhaps to be sold for big bucks on eBay or used as an ashtray.

Because of the physics of wrestling, I never should have been permitted near the mat. Wrestlers are paired by weight, so obviously, if two wrestlers are the same weight, the shorter one will always win. If you apply enough pressure to a joint, it will snap, so it helps to have a thick, square, blocklike build, preferably with no joints at all. I was very tall, bony, stretched out like a sweatsock that had just been used as a gorilla condom, with a long neck that was easily laced into a full W indsor. Every wrestler my weight was built like a minifridge, so it was literally impossible for me to win a match unless I packed a nunchaku, or unless I pulled out the easily concealed and widely advertised Kiyoga: the Steel Cobra. I was below featherweight, bantamweight, chickenweight—somewhere near a shameweight.

Oddly, this is one of the few areas in my life where I was brimming with confidence, if only because there was no pressure to win. Indeed, if I lasted the whole match and lost on points, instead of getting pinned immediately, my teammates would slap me on the back as if I’d crushed a man with my bare hands. I had never been so extravagantly proud of having blood that clotted. Wrestling was to my teen years what karaoke became to my adulthood—a pursuit where I had no skill but total enthusiasm and full commitment, a performance ritual where I felt completely devoid of shame.

This wrestling was not like “pro wrestling,” which was big on television at the time but still a few years away from exploding into the mass entertainment juggernaut it has become, to the point where my dad would take my little sister to Boston Garden to see the stars stomp each other’s tracheas. Our team did not have colorful stage names or flamboyant personalities, nor were we permitted to jump from any lighting fixtures. I guess it was kind of a transitional period in terms of male-combat culture. Spiritually, we were trapped in the odd historical vacuum between
Rocky II
and
Rocky III.
Rocky was still the world heavyweight champion—he hadn’t lost his crown, wept at Mickey’s deathbed, been pitied by Mr. T.He had not regained the eye of the tiger. We had no way of knowing Apollo Creed was going to help him rise up to the challenge of his rival, much less that Rocky was going to eventually knock out Ivan Drago, Tommy Gunn, or Mason “The Line” Dixon. The jury was still out on this Balboa meathead. He would have been a great role model, but as it was, I had to face this battle on my own and don my tights of redemption-scented Lycra.

My coach, Steel Neil Coughlin, was a stoic about it, since he had no way to boot me from the junior varsity team—there was no level lower than JV, and I was equally unsuited for the other winter sports. Squash was fun, but in the winter the courts belonged to the varsity. Basketball was always a drag for me, as it is for most fifteen-year-olds who are six feet tall yet unable to throw things. My sisters, who were built like me, absolutely killed at volleyball, so I tried it once, and then I saw stars and that was the end of that. When I was a junior, my school introduced badminton, which was clearly a P.E. department ploy to get me away from the wrestling room, and it worked, since the first time I played badminton was like the first time I tasted sushi or heard the Beatles or read Wordsworth.
This
was a sport? This counted for gym requirements? “Pleased to meet you, badminton,” I told the shuttlecock. “Hope you guessed my name.” But at this point, the badminton team was just a gleam in Steel Neil’s increasingly exasperated eye.

At that age, any physical activity vaguely resembling sexual contact is hilarious. But there’s nothing vague about wrestling. It begins with one dude on hands and knees, as the other one wraps an arm around to nestle against his chest (the “upside-down belt hold”) and another arm on his elbow. Then they roll around on the rubber mat. A wrestling match will often involve a friction boner or two. So a serious attitude is a must. Otherwise, you’ll just giggle and miss the more difficult pleasures available to the true wrestler. The varsity wrestling team, who used the practice room after we did, were very serious guys, and it was inspiring to watch them stretch for hours while we rehearsed our falls and clinches. There’s no denying that there was an element of showing off for these guys. The varsity team was undefeated, feared throughout the Independent School League. I hope it was inspirational to watch us warm up the mat for them, falling down in incredibly complicated ways.

At practice, I always paired up with my buddy Flynn, who had a similarly Zen approach to the sport, derived from
Kung Fu
reruns on Channel 38. We were fascinated with the strategy of combat, the chesslike logical quandaries, the questions of leverage and balance. It was yogic, in a way, even if I was the kind of yogi whose lotus position was two shoulders to the mat. We loved the uniform and the ritual of lacing up the boots. As adolescent boys who loved martial arts mythology but were too lazy to actually learn any martial arts, wrestling suited our warrior-philosopher fantasies.

Flynn and I were well matched physically and cerebrally, so the time we spent with our faces in proximity facilitated our philosophical discussions.

“You know what would suck?” he mused one day as we grappled on the leather mat, standing face to face for the clinch.

“What would suck?”

“In
1984,
if Winston Smith was afraid of squirrels instead of rats.”

We were reading George Orwell in English class, and since we were the Class of ’84, we identified heavily with its dystopian vision.

“Why would that suck?”

“That would render him laughable. It wouldn’t be horrible when they show him rats in Room 101. It would just be funny.”

“True,” I conceded, scoring reversal points on the half nelson. “That would suck.”

“The torture guys would probably just laugh.”

“Even the squirrels would laugh. Winston’s resistance to evil would have meant nothing.”

“It would doubleplus suck.”

We dropped to our knees to execute the Olympic lift.

“This is all true,” I said. “Yet I cannot help but feel that what would really suck would be living in that futuristic totalitarian society. In fact, I think it’s a little strange, and maybe disturbing, you come away from the novel thinking that’s what would suck.”

“Or rabbits.”

“What about hamsters?”

“That would suck too.”

He slipped his arms into the forbidden full nelson. I nudged him away with my jaw.

“What about cats?”

“Not as much as rabbits.”

“Bats. That would be awesome.”

“Awesome.”

“What do you call a masturbating cow?”

“Beef stroganoff.”

Splaaat!
Pinned. Again.

Wrestling team was my first experience riding in vans with groups of other boys who were all dressed alike. It was extremely exciting. Not surprising, since we were guys, we argued over music in the van, with the usual battle of rock versus disco. Doug Martilla had the boom box, and everyone had a different idea of what constituted proper psych-up music for the match ahead of us. Jose from the Bronx, the first kid I ever saw breakdance in real life, brought salsa tapes to get the testosterone pumping. He was serious, and clearly bound for varsity next year. The kid who brought in Yes was clearly killing time till Frisbee season. One kid always insisted on The Who’s
Quadrophenia
, which suggests a self-sabotaging sense of doom.

The tape everyone could agree on was the Stones. Jose pointed out the congas in “Sympathy for the Devil,” but
Hot Rocks
had too many slow songs, so it always ended up being the Maxell C-90 tape with
Emotional Rescue
on one side and
Tattoo You
on the other. “She’s So Cold,” that was the jam. Mick Jagger sang like he was a hot girl, so it was odd how perfect he was at psyching us up for a wrestling match. Mick Jagger was a skinny-guy role model for me, at a time when it was not acceptable to be skinny—those were the days of Soloflex Man posters and Nautilus ads. My bone structure would have been an undeniable asset if I’d been a future Eastern European tranny underwear model, yet it was a stigma for a high school boy in that time and place. It was embarrassing to have other people see my shoulders, arms or legs. But in wrestling drag, my body was invisible, because I was in character. All anyone could see was the unitard of valor.

Or at least that’s how I perceived it. Of course, at any match, the other team across the room would see me on the bench, and eagerly check the coach’s clipboard to see which one of them got
that
kid. I never had to check Mr. Coughlin’s clipboard, because I could always tell the guy who was paired up with me—he was the one sitting on the bench, salivating, twitching his knee because he could barely wait for his turn to get out there. He had that delirious look in his eye. You know in the cartoons when Bugs Bunny gets trapped in the desert, starved for food, so then he looks over at Daffy Duck and sees a mirage where Daffy’s a roast duck rotating on a spit? That look.

To pin me, he had to hold my shoulders down on the mat for three seconds, when the ref would blow his whistle and give the mat that resounding
splaaat
slap. So that means I was guaranteed to last at least three seconds out there, and I loved the adrenaline of stepping out by myself, no teammates to lean on, the eyes of the crowd on me, maybe a dropped jaw or two, all the bitterly jealous guys on the other side of the room wishing they’d gained or lost a few pounds in time to pair off with me. I loved the squeaky noises of our wrestling shoes on the mat. I was a star, or at least part of the show, and I walked tall out there. Taking my stand. Defending my . . .
splaaat
!

On the way home, we bonded. If anyone resented me bringing our team record down, nobody ever mentioned it or made fun of me for it. We’d fought hard that day. Next year, some of us would make varsity; some of us would run around the gym waving a badminton racquet. But tonight, we sang the Stones all the way back to school.

Over two seasons, I lost fourteen matches. I made them earn it—no surrender, no retreat, no permanent spinal damage. I didn’t count how many times I went the distance and lost on points, rather than getting pinned before the match ended, but I know there were a bunch of those. I learned a lot about bringing down an opponent and using his aggressive energy against him, as long as he doesn’t have any muscles. If I ever end up in a bar brawl with a flamingo, I am taking that bastard down.

My wife still does not believe me.

1982

 

 

 

 

Around ninth grade, my trusty clock radio began playing something weird. First, it went
clink-clank
. Then it went
bloop-bloop
. After the
wrrrp-wrrrp
kicked in, there came a blizzard of
squisha-squisha-squisha
noises. It sounded like a Morse code transmission from another planet, a world of lust and danger and nonstop erotic cabaret. What
was
this? It was the twitchy, spastic, brand-new beat of synth-pop. For those of us who were “Kids in America” at the time, it was a totally divisive sound. You either loved it or hated it. My friends and I argued for hours over whether it even counted as rock and roll. I remember hearing a DJ explain that the Human League didn’t have any instruments. No way—not even a drummer? Not even a
guitarist
? I was shocked.

I rode my bike to the public library and checked out the Human League’s
Dare.
This album was a brave new world. The sleeve showed close-ups of their mascara eyes and lipstick mouths on a frigid white background. Nobody was smiling. All summer long, I worked mowing lawns, listening to that tape over and over, taking it on the subway ride to driver’s ed. I spent countless hours trying to fathom Phil Oakey’s philosophy of life.

I was moved by “The Sound of the Crowd,” where Phil urged me to “get around town,” to explore the forbidden places “where the people are good, where the music is loud.” I had never been to a place remotely like this. It sounded awesome. The lyrics were a bit obscure, what with all the arcane cosmetics references (“The lines on a compact guide / A hat with alignment worn inside”—huh?), yet I devoured them. If I cracked his code well, I too would grow up to be a Phil Oakey, getting around the world on an existential quest for love action.

There were more where the League came from: Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Heaven 17, Duran Duran, Kim Wilde, my beloved Haysi Fantayzee. We got all the U.K. synth-poppers a year or so after the Brits were through with them, but we were glad to have them. Any arty Brit-twerp with a magenta wedge and octagonal drum pads was a go.