After the punk festival, my wife asks me
what I loved most—
the man whose music
we named our daughter after or
the clown that bellows baritone covers
in a vaudevillian sort of schtick or
the bands upon bands upon bands that
I followed on absolutepunk.net
twenty years ago,
but it was none of them because
I skipped them because
the National Wrestling Alliance had set up
a ring between a Malört bar and a corn dog stand that
I couldn't look away from. I intended to
watch just a match, a guy in a Superman-blue speedo vs.
another with oily black clumps of hair, a sort of Medusa, and
even though I couldn't have cared less,
or—
even though I thought I couldn't have cared less,
Medusa was done dirty when
the ref stared instead at Speedo's girlfriend,
who'd bent over to pick up,
well,
nothing now that I think of it,
and that injustice felt wrong,
soured my throat and churned my stomach and
made me clench my asshole
(though it might have been the Malört & corn dogs & heat), and
I couldn't look away.
I sizzled in that sun for hours.
It painted red across my neck,
across the sides of my arms,
across the sliver of my lower back that
slipped out
after I wiggled my way to the front between matches,
leaned over the railing as much as my Midwestern politeness would allow
to devour the wrestlers' air & stink & sound,
to high five them as they passed,
to wipe the slick of their sweat & oil & hair gel through my own,
to chant finish him while a face whose name I’d never catch towered over
a heel whose name I’d also never catch
in a corner twenty feet away,
while he drove elbows down and onto the heel's head
for some prior transgression;
while I shouted ohhhhh with a hundred or so strangers
when the face dragged the heel out to the center of the ring,
ohhhhh at each chop across the heel's chest,
at each grimace across his face,
his lips twisted like a pretzel,
his eyes closed so tight I could see the sweat running across their wrinkles, taste
the salt they carried.
And there was something about the swell of it all
that felt like just what I'd come for
or maybe what I’d needed—
not to writhe in a pit or
tumble across a tangle of outstretched hands toward
the bands upon bands upon bands that
I followed on absolutepunk.net
twenty years ago,
but to guzzle down each clothesline, each dropkick;
to nudge the stranger next to me and mouth, holy shit;
to lap up a sense of right and wrong, of justice, of community,
of fun;
because sometimes,
one man's hands
whipped across another man's chest
or locked and pulled across another man's face
will remind you that there can be joy in tapping out
of the entanglement of your expectations of yourself,
of others' expectations of you, that there can be joy in
submitting to where you’ve found yourself,
to what the world has given you.
Adam Shaw’s work has previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, Autofocus, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Louisville, Kentucky, and can be found online at theshawspot.com.
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