W is for Wrestling

I rented “The Wrestler” the other night and I thought it was quite good, though relentlessly bleak.  Mickey Rourke is terrific and who knew that Marisa Tomei, who plays an aging stripper with a heart of gold, had such a slinky, smoking-hot body?  My Cousin Booby.

Anyway, the movie reminded me of my long-time – and somewhat embarrassing – interest in professional wrestling.  I’m not quite sure why I first got into it. 

Perhaps because I was the quintessential 98-pound weakling as a boy and all of the wrestlers looked like Charles Atlas.  Vicariously, I could be the one kicking sand into the weakling’s face, not the one eating the sand sandwich. 

Perhaps because I’ve always been interested in the struggle between good and evil, and in wrestling – unlike in life – it was always so crystal clear who was good (“the face,” to use the lingo) and who was evil (“the heel”). 

Perhaps because it was slightly illicit (at least back then) and I was always the goodiest of the goody two shoes.  By being a pro wrestling fan, I was, in some pathetically small way, being a bad boy.

Anyway, I think it’s fair to say that I was a wrestling fan when wrestling wasn’t cool.  These days, you can see wrestling on cable TV just about any day of the week and pro wrestlers like John Cena star in big-budget action movies and make Subway commercials. 

Back then, there was no such thing as cable TV (oh, crap, I am old), so I would go with my friend Glenn Reynolds and his dad to see live wrestling at the New Haven Coliseum and the Hartford Civic Center.  Nothing glamorous here, friends, just lots of beer, cigarettes, and good old-fashioned “slobber knockers” featuring wrestlers like Bob Backlund, Pedro Morales, Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, and “Big Daddy” Don Muraco.

Then, the damndest thing happened.  A guy named Hulk Hogan came along and wrestling broke into the mainstream.  Everyone knows the Hulkster now, of course, and he has become something of a caricature.  But he was quite the genuine phenomenon back then and I loved him.  Suddenly, wrestling was on NBC every Saturday night.  Cyndi Lauper was involved.  Mr. T was involved.  Wrestling was cool.  And that meant that I was cool, too.

In time, wrestling faded from the limelight and I started to follow it far more sporadically.  Every once in a while, a new breakthrough wrestler would come along – like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and “The Rock,” who now, remarkably, stars in Disney movies – and I would pay more attention. 

Even now, if I come across a match while channel surfing, I’ll watch for a while.  Nothing has changed – the wrestlers are still huge, good still triumphs over evil, and I would still quickly change the channel if someone walked into the room – and I take some comfort in that. 

And that’s the bottom line, because Stone Cold said so!

D is for Divorce(d)

Free at last, free at… Oh, come on, you know the rest, don’t you?  Anyway, as of Thursday, May 7, at about 2:00 p.m., I re-joined the ranks of the single folk.  After 10 years of marriage, I am officially dee-vorced. 

How does it feel?  Well, I am NOT going to Disneyland.  (Can’t afford it anymore.)  But it does feel pretty good.  

It’s kind of like banging your head against a wall.  It hurts, but if you do it long enough, the pain becomes a part of your life — so much so that you no longer even realize that you’re IN pain.  Until you stop, that is, and realize, “Holy shit, that HURT.  My head really fucking HURT for a LONG fucking time.  And now it doesn’t.  And that feels really fucking GOOOOD.”

I am not gloating here.  Basically, I got my ass handed to me in the divorce settlement.  The divorce business (and make no mistake about it, it IS a business) is one of the few in the world where being a man is a distinct DIS-advantage. 

I had a final, blinding moment of clarity about this on the day of my divorce, when I looked around for sympathy and saw my lawyer (a woman), my ex-wife’s lawyer (a woman), the two court-appointed mediators assigned to our case (both women), and the judge (a woman).  One of these things is not like the other.  Oh, wait, it’s ME!  As Kenny Rogers said, you got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, and, son, it was time to fold ‘em.  So that’s what I did.

Still, all is not lost.  I am now poorer in wallet, but richer in every other way you could possibly imagine.  At the tender age of 41, I am REBORN (and rising, baby, always rising).

Having survived this experience relatively intact, I feel obliged to “pay it forward” — to impart the lessons learned along the way to those of you who also will someday stop banging your head against that dreaded wall.  In no particular order, here they are…

• Use a mediator, not lawyers, and, if at all possible, get it done without any of them — It’s a difficult process emotionally, but if you had asked me nine months ago to sketch out the broad strokes of where things would have ended up, I would have come pretty darn close.  Everyone thinks their situation is unique.  Basically, NO ONE’S situation is unique — but people getting paid by the hour have very little incentive to tell you that.  You can spend $50K to figure that out or you can just take it from me.
• Pick your battles — For me, I wanted to have frequent access to my kids.  (Awwwww….)  I was willing to go to the mat for that.  Everything else was negotiable.  No one gets everything they want.  Not even the women. 
• It’s only money — No, it doesn’t grow on trees — not even in the backyard of the dwelling I used to call my home, contrary to popular belief.  But money IS overrated and, like Doritos, you can always make more.  Toward the bitter end, I asked my friend, Liam, for advice.  “If she asks for $50K, give her a hundred,” he said.  His figures were off by a factor of ten, but, philosophically, he was exactly right.  Probably explains why he’s been happily married for about 17 years. 
• Be nice — In the course of getting divorced, there are about 4,000 opportunities to be decent or to be a dick.  Be decent about 3,995 times — not for the benefit of your ex, but for the benefit of YOU.    

So there you have it.  I hope you never need it.

V Is for Video Games

I was something of a video-game nerd growing up.  We had Pong, the original home video game, and I also had the first Atari home gaming system. 

Pong was elegant in its simplicity.  You hit a “ball” (a little white square) with your “rackets” (white vertical lines on the far left and right of the screen).  The ball bounced back and forth, sometimes ricocheting off the walls of the “court” (the top and bottom of the screen).  I can still remember the thrilling sounds of the action — little “beeps” and “bee-doops” every time the ball was struck or bounced off the wall.   

The Atari system was a quantuum leap forward.  Their big selling point was that they offered home versions of the most popular arcade games — Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, etc.  This was very cool, even though the home games never came close to matching the graphics of the original arcade games.   The big breakthrough game on the Atari system was Pitfall, in which you were an Indiana Jones-esque character running through the jungle, jumping over boulders, and swinging on vines over crocodile-infested waters all in an attempt to gather treasure.  The graphics were remarkably sophisticated at the time and I played it for hours on end.  I especially remember the sound the game made when you would swing on a vine — an electronic variation of Tarzan’s famous yell.  

I took my two kids to visit my parents earlier this week and — since they never, ever throw anything away — there in my old room was my old Vectrex video game system.  The Vectrex system was self-contained — you didn’t need to hook it to a television.  Many of the games were knock-offs of popular arcade games, including Minestorm, a total Asteroids rip-off that  came pre-loaded on the machine.  We cranked up the Vectrex and I wondered what my kids would make of it since there is probably more computing power in a doorbell today than there was in the entire Vectrex system in 1982, when it was first released. 

They loved it.

There is something very elemental — and timeless, I suppose — about Asteroids.  Your space ship is in the middle of the screen.  Asteroids fly through space and your job is to shoot them before they crash into you.  Trouble is that when you shoot an asteroid, it splits into two smaller asteroids and so on and so on until your tiny little ship is surrounded by a shitload of little asteroids, which are just as deadly as the big ones.  Oh, and every once in a while, an enemy space ship comes out of nowhere and tries to kill you, too.  If you happen to make it through one asteroid field, your reward is an uglier asteroid field, where the action is even more frenetic.

My three-year-old son grasped the basics of the game in about two minutes — and played it for about two hours.  The only concept he seemed to struggle with was ”hyperspace” — the ability to get out of a jam by hitting a button that instantly teleports you to a different, and presumably safer, part of the screen.

How great would it be to have a hyperspace button in real life?  The boss comes looking for you, the annoying neighbor sees you getting out of your car, the kids think it’s time that you wake up from your nap on the couch. 

Blip… You’re gone.

B Is for Barber Shop

I do not get my haircut at salons.  I go to barber shops, baby.  Unlike John Edwards, I get my haircut for $15.  That’s 26 haircuts for me; one for Mr. Edwards.  Today, I went to a new barber shop, the Fanwood Clipper, just down the street from my new apartment in my new hometown.  Lots of new things, to be sure, but a new barber?  Now, THAT is significant.

As a child, I got my haircut at Woodmont Haircutters in Milford, CT.  Pat was my barber and he was a nice enough guy.  He called me “Thomas,” not “Tom” and I’m not really sure why.  At a certain point, my mom stopped accompanying me to see Pat and so I had to pay him myself, which I found to be quite awkward, especially the tipping part.  A ten-year old tipping a forty-year old?  In retrospect, I’m sure he didn’t give a shit — money is money, after all — but I thought it was odd.

In college, I got my haircut at a barber shop called Phil’s on the Yale campus in New Haven, CT.  Karl was the barber you wanted.  He was no better of a barber than any of the other guys in the shop.  But at the end of the haircut, Karl would give you a scalp rub that would transport you to another universe.  The running joke among me and my roommates was that heaven on earth would be Karl rubbing your scalp while a woman (any woman, really) gave you a blowjob.  I never pulled that one off, sad to say, but I’m young yet.

After college, I moved to New York City and began getting my haircut at a barber shop in Grand Central Station.  Tony was my barber there, a lovely, and ancient, guy, who cut my hair for several years before he went to that great barbershop in the sky.  Tony’s big finishing move was swaddling your face in a scalding hot towel.  He would slap it on there and pat it a few times, just to ensure that no follicle was left behind.  Oh, man, that was good stuff.

For the past several years, I’ve been getting my hair cut at the Towne Barbershop in Westfield, NJ.  This is such the quintessentially American barber shop that they routinely film television commercials there.  More importantly for me, they open at 7:00 a.m.  What a way to start the day!

I keep my hair short, so if it gets too long, I get very uncomfortable.  There is a “point of no return” for me with my hair, actually.  One day, it’s fine.  The next — whoa, mama! — it’s time to get a haircut.  A few years ago, I was in desperate need of a haircut, but could never seem to get myself to the Towne Barbershop either before work in the morning or after work in the evening.  One day after work, I began driving around town, looking for someplace — anyplace — to get my haircut.  I found myself in the one African-American neighborhood in Westfield and, sure enough, there was a barber shop, open for business.

I walked in and was reminded of those moments in “Ally McBeal” when something strange or awkward would happen and the record would just scratch hideously.  I’m sure they thought I had popped in to ask for directions or something. 

“Can I get a haircut?” I said enthusiastically. 

One of the guys — they were all fairly young — motioned me to have a seat in his chair. 

“Short all around.” I said, as I’ve been saying to barbers since about 1978.

The barber took out a comb and poked at my hair a bit.  He looked confused.

“Short all around?” he repeated. 

“That’s right,” I said.

“Come with me,” he said, after he tentatively ran the comb through my hair a few more times.  He led me to the back of the shop.  A yellowed poster of various white-guy haircuts hung on the wall.  “Any of these?” he said.

“That one,” I said and he gave it his very best shot.  A typical haircut for me lasts about 15 minutes.  I was in that barbershop for a good hour. 

Today’s haircut was excellent, though it’s always hard to tell right off the bat.  It cost $15 and took about 15 minutes.  $20 plus tip.

M is for Money

I like money.  A lot.  I don’t believe that money can buy happiness.  I DO believe that money can take some big uglies off the table in life and provide for interesting and enriching experiences.

I have money now, but that hasn’t always been the case.  I remember my very first job as a boy.  I was about ten years old and delivered a weekly penny saver, The Milford Reporter, in the condominium where I lived (and where my parents still live) and in the condo across the street — about 250 houses in all.  I was paid $7 a week.  My first monthly paycheck arrived early one Saturday morning, tucked on top of the pile of papers that were dropped in front of my house (how quaint).  My mom brought the envelope to me in my room, where I was still sleeping.  I opened the envelope and stared at the check in wide-eyed wonder.  $28!  I hugged my mother as though we had just won the lottery. 

In college, I worked two jobs, but it still wasn’t enough to make ends meet, so I often volunteered to be a subject in experiments run by the Psychology Department.  They were pretty benign, really, no shocking people with electrodes or anything like that.  I remember one time, I was in a room with a girl and we were waiting for the professor to come in and tell us what we were going to be doing.  (Dear Penthouse, I never thought something like this would happen to me…)  We waited and waited and eventually the professor came in and said the experiement actually involved putting two strangers in a room and observing their interactions.  He had been watching us the whole time through a two-way mirror.  We were free to go, he said, and we each got $10, I think.  I could make $10 last about a week back then.    

My first job out of college was at a small public relations agency in New York City.  I was making $22,000 a year and lived in a studio apartment that quite possibly had less square footage than my current master bathroom.  I had to rent the place in a hurry, since the guy who was going to be my roommate decided at the last minute to play soccer in Portugal instead.  A few weeks went by between the time I signed the lease (for $600 a month, if memory serves) and when I moved in.  During that time, the apartment grew in size in my mind.  I had fun imagining where I would put all my stuff.  On moving day, I eagerly unlocked the door and walked proudly into my new pad.  A few minutes later, I was slumped in a corner, crying.  It was so SMALL. 

My apartment was on the first floor, and had just one big window that looked right out onto 85th Street, which was kind of cool.  The garbage cans for the building were stored in front of my window, which was NOT so cool and, one time, nearly proved fatal.  It was the dead of night and I woke up thinking, “Christ, it’s hot in here.”  I sat up in bed, still half asleep.  “Why is it so LIGHT in here?” I thought.  I looked up to see a wall of fire in front of my window.  The garbage cans were on fire — set on fire, it turned out, by a disgruntled ex-tenant who had fallen behind on his rent and been evicted.  Since the apartment was so small, my bed was just a few feet from the window.  I could hear the glass starting to crack under the heat.  Someone started pounding on my front door.  It was the fire department.  A minute later, I was standing out on 85th Street in my underwear.

My first winter in New York was tough.  I had a coat, but it wasn’t a full-fledged winter coat.  I either was too broke or too cheap to spring for a new coat, so I wore that stupid old coat all winter long.  There is cold, friends, and then there is New York City cold.  The tall buildings funnel the wind and it can be absolutely brutal.  I froze my ass off that winter.       

On the rare occasion when I went out to dinner in those days, I typically would order pasta or, if I was feeling especially flush, the chicken.  I remember thinking, “If I can just get to thirty grand a year, I’ll be all set, I’ll never want for anything.”  Well, I got to twenty-nine grand about a year later and thirty-five grand the year after that.  Things got better.  I got a better apartment (on the third floor!) and a better coat.

People are funny about money, and I suppose I am, too.  I’m happy to tell you how much money I earned right out of college, for example, but I won’t share with you the current figure.  I have friends who I probably outearn by a mile and others who could buy and sell me in a heartbeat, but it’s never openly discussed (except when we all claim to be broke, of course, which is a riot).  Still, having been quite legitimately close to broke at one point in my life and now being quite well off by any objective standard, I can tell you that I prefer the latter. 

Will it last?  I think about that all the time.  I had a boss once who had a similar blue-collar upbringing as I did.  He told me that he went through his now-very-comfortable life waiting for someone to tap him on the shoulder and say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?  Get back to where you belong!”  I knew exactly what he was talking about, but offer a word of warning to the guy who’s thinking about tapping me on my shoulder.  I ain’t going down easy, brother. 

N is for Nicknames

A friend of mine about to enter the blogosphere asked me to help her come up with a pseudonym.  She will be blogging about dating, so wishes, understandably, to remain anonymous. It got me thinking about the nicknames I’ve had in my life, a few of which have stuck with me to this day.

The first nickname I can remember having was “Torque.”

Torque was the sidekick on the TV show “A Man Called Sloane,” starring Robert Conrad. The show aired in 1979, so I was about 11 years old. I’m not sure how I earned this nickname, since Torque was a bald, 6′5″, African-American with a detachable hand that could be converted into a wide variety of weapons and tools. Perhaps everyone was calling me “Dork” and I just misheard?

Another nickname I had in grammar school was “Frito Lay.”  This makes even less sense to me than Torque because I despise Fritos and have a hard time imagining that kids in grammar school would think to say “Frito LAY,” since that is the name of the food company that makes Fritos and Lays potato chips, among other snacks.  How would kids know to put the word “Lay” on the end of that nickname?  I can see some kind of sex joke in there now, but I don’t think that’s what was going on back then.  (What would a Frito lay be like anyway?  Crunchy and salty?)  Nevertheless, that’s how I remember it.

In college, I acquired the nickname “Leggy” and this is the one that many of my friends still use today.  (Variations include “Legs,” “Legger,” “Legs Diamond,” and “Legman.”)  The simple explanation for this nickname is that I’m 6′4″ (damn near Torque height!) and have very long legs, but, thankfully, there’s more to it than that.

I possess no athletic ability, as I’ve indicated in previous posts, but two of my roommates in college were varsity soccer players.  They went out for a run one afternoon and I decided to join them.  After about ten minutes, they were just getting warmed up and I was about ready to pass out.  They found this quite amusing and began making fun of me, running backwards and taunting me.  (They remain two of my best friends.)  With an inspired burst of energy, I sprinted past them, shrieking something to the effect of, “You can’t catch me, motherfuckers, I’m LEGGY!”  They caught up to me about 15 seconds later, of course, but the name stuck.

(In the category of “turnabout is fair play,” one of these guys, Peter, was subsequently nicknamed “Flavio,” in honor of his complete lack of smoothness with the ladies, while the other one, Dave, was christened “Sparky,” for no apparent reason whatsoever.  Flavio stuck; Sparky never quite caught on.  Dave’s kids today call Peter “Uncle Flav” and me “Uncle Leggy.”  My kids call Dave “Uncle Dave.”  Is there no justice in this world?)

I worked at a PR firm right out of college and had a mentor there who called me “T-man,” since my first name is Tom.  I called him “V-man,” even though his first name was Rick, because he took lots of vacation.  (We were not gay lovers.)

I had a girlfriend around the same time who called me “Mookie.”  We were at my parents’ house one weekend watching a Mets game with my Dad, when Mookie Wilson came up to bat.  “We thought about naming Tom Mookie,” my dad said and that was the end of that.

More recently, my sister-in-law Peggy (known as “Pucky” to us now, since that’s how my daughter first pronounced the name “Peggy”) gave me the nickname “Poppy Lo-Lo.”  We were visiting Pucky at her home in Sun Valley, Idaho.  At one point, after a few glasses of wine, Pucky and a friend of hers started dancing to “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot, which, by the way, has perhaps the greatest first line — “I like big butts and I cannot lie” — in the history of music.  This got us to thinking about what our “rapper names” might be and Pucky came up with Poppy Lo-Lo for me.

There was a little dog at this party, named Gussy.  He walked into Pucky’s house and promptly crapped on the carpet.  His rapper name?  “Poop Doggy Dog.”

L Is for Lost

The one thing in the world that I hate more than just about anything else is being lost.  I also happen to get lost with startling frequency. 

My sense of direction is so hideous that, for a while, my approach was simply to head in the opposite direction of whatever way I thought was correct.  If I thought I should make a right turn, I actually forced myself to make a left.  Then I started to overanalyze it.  “I think I should turn right, which probably means that left is correct, but since I now think that left is probably correct, that probably means I should go right.”  Wrong.

For Christmas this year, I gave myself a Garmin, an amazing little GPS system for my car.  Since then, the Garmin has been out of my car on two occasions and I managed to get lost both times.  The first time, I brought the Garmin into my office to show it off to my co-workers, left it on my desk, headed to an off-site meeting, and promptly got lost.  The second time, I let my wife borrow the Garmin, headed to dinner with a friend, and, again, got lost.  Neither the off-site meeting nor the dinner were in out-of-the-way locations, by the way, but it really doesn’t matter.  Near, far, the end result is almost always the same. 

A few months ago, for example, I drove about 50 miles in the wrong direction, convinced with every fiber of my being that the NJ Turnpike is the same thing as I-95 — this despite the fact that I had printed directions in hand clearly telling me otherwise.  I even have found myself trying to outthink the Garmin.  “Turn right?  What are you, crazy?”  (They have yet to come out with a Garmin smart enough to respond, “Just turn, asshole.”  All in good time.)

My deep hatred for being lost stems from an even deeper desire to be in control of every situation I find myself in.  Some people can laugh off being lost, or even treat it as a little adventure.  “Is that the Canadian border?  Neat!”  I, on the other hand, literally can feel my heart begin to race and my body temperature start to rise the moment I sense that I am lost or, more broadly stated, the moment I feel things starting to slip from my control.  (I drove the last few blocks to the dinner mentioned above with my window all the way down even though it was about 30 degrees outside that night.)

A good sense of direction is something you either have or you don’t.  I don’t, and that’s pretty much the end of that.  What am I supposed to do, sit around and study maps?

S Is For St. John

St. John is my favorite place on earth, bar none.  We have a time share at the Westin there and and I love it more and more every time we go.  St. John is the kind of place that makes me feel the way I wish I felt more often — calm, happy, and slightly buzzed in the early afternoon.  I have a shark-tooth necklace that I wear when we go there.  When I have it on, my sister-in-law, Peggy, says, “Poppy has his freak on!”  As soon as we get back home, I take the necklace off and, that’s it, the vacation is OVER.

St. John is incredibly beautiful and still fairly undeveloped once you get out of the main town of Cruz Bay.  A few years ago, we were driving down a narrow, roughly paved road and had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a wild donkey.  This August, Peggy and I woke up early, jumped in the rental car, and headed to Maho Bay, where we were, quite literally, the only two people on a postcard-perfect beach.  We snorkeled with not one, not two, but three sea turtles.  (Hint: They hang out in the sea grass, not on the reef.)

St. John is also a great place for foodies.  We’ve always enjoyed the Fish Trap, Chloe & Bernard’s at the Westin, and, above all, the Stone Terrace.  Prepare to spend a shitload of money pretty much no matter where you go. 

This August, my wife, son, sister-in-law and I went on a “sunset sail.” (My daughter and mother-in-law stayed on dry land.)  This is just about as good as it gets for me.  Out on the water, the wind blowing, the sails billowing, the bar open.  I was about four beers into it when I decided to take some pictures of my family.  So there I was – the camera in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other — when a particularly large set of swells came our way.   I fell in slow motion and in several stages.  First, I fell onto my ass.  Then I went down onto my back.  Then my legs went way up into the air.  I am proud to say that I did not drop the camera, nor did I spill a drop of beer.   Still, I know it was a spectacular sight to see because my son — who was 19 months old at the time — STILL says to me periodically, “Daddy fall down boat?”  Yes, son, and someday you, too, will fall down boat.   

My wife has ruled out retiring to St. John because she cannot imagine driving there.  They drive on the left side of the road and the twists, turns, and hills are, I must admit, a little unnerving.  Still, I have worked it out with her that I will retire to St. John permanently when I die by being cremated and turned into an artificial reef.  It will be my small way of giving something back to a very special place that has given so much to me. 

V Is for Vasectomy

On November 19, I will be placed under a mild, general anaesthesia and a doctor will make a small incision in my nutsack.  He will then remove a piece of my vas deferens, which is basically, a transportation duct for sperm (and, now, the name of that rock band I will try to form before I die).  He will cauterize (yep, I said cauterize) and tie off the two ends of the vas deferens, and sew me back up with a few butterfly stitches.  I will not be sterile right away.  Apparently, millions of sperm still linger around for a while.  But once I ejaculate 15 times or so (which, at the current pace brings us to around 3Q 2011), my baby-making days will officially have come to an end. 

I’m approaching V-day with no fear whatsoever about the procedure itself, but with some melancholy around the finality of it all.  I have fathered two amazing children — a girl and a boy — and my wife and I both strongly believe that two is the right number for us. 

And yet…

What if my wife runs off with George Clooney?  Or, as she has suggested, dies in a fiery car crash?  Would I re-marry?  If I did, would I want to have children with my new (incredibly young and hot) wife?  I guess we’ve decided to play the percentages here (back off, Georgie boy!), but shit happens.  It’s also one of those contradictory things where you spend much of your life trying to avoid getting women pregnant, but there’s still something nice about knowing that you could if you wanted to.

All in all, though, I know it is the right decision.  There is just something incredibly pathetic about a 39-year-old man fumbling in the dark to try and get a condom on before the mighty oak becomes a weeping willow, or about my 36-year-old wife having an anxiety attack if she’s 20 minutes late getting her period. 

So I will take one for the team and do the deed.  More to follow on this topic to be sure.