Old Teammates

When I was a teenager in coastal Virginia in the 1980s, I wavered back and forth between friend groups. One group was surfer and skater kids. The other was jocks—football players, wrestlers (I was a champion wrestler at one point in my life, many wrinkles and arthritic limps ago). Some of the surfer and skater kids were wild and into smoking weed and drinking, but they were generally peaceful, never carried themselves around with a vibe of threat or menace. A small number of the jocks I knew, on the other hand, did fit, I'm sorry to say, a much-depicted cliché in which toxic masculinity is wrapped in a letterman's jacket. They were hostility personified—racist, sexually predatory, homophobic, reflexively bullying, itching for a fight. Self-proclaimed warriors. I got drunk and passed out once as a young teen, maybe fourteen, possibly thirteen, and a few of my older and much bigger wrestling teammates pissed in my face, my nose, my mouth. Humiliate. Destroy. Smile while doing it. Repeat. They were perfect young fascists in their way.

Lately, because of America's cultural and political fevers, because ours is a sick society, I've been reading a lot about fascism—Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Tony Judt, Jean Améry, George Orwell, Dubravka Ugrešic—and noticing over and over how clearly the Italian, German, and Spanish versions of fascism (and Serbian nascent quasi-fascism after the breakup of Yugoslavia) expressed a straightforward toxic masculinity on a mass scale. This isn't any great insight, I know, but this repeating historical template of how personal male psychology becomes social psychology becomes demagoguery becomes movement becomes power becomes organized punishing force toward various forms of "the other" becomes devastation and tragedy has been sending up autobiographical flares from my past. And I've been having this recurring memory—part fragment, part mix of daydream and dream—which was mostly buried and forgotten before this reading and seems prominent and even pressing now, so I'm going to write it down.

About a quarter of a century ago, I ran into some of my old wrestling teammates at a poker party in a large back room of a restaurant and bar. I was maybe twenty-four or twenty-five years old and in graduate school. I can't remember why I was there, the set of choices that led me there. I don't gamble. I hadn't been in touch with the people who were there for years. I can't reconstruct even a sketchy set of circumstances or relationships or reasons that might have caused me to do this. Was it a sports reunion of some sort? I kind of just arrive in the memory unfolding.

While at this gathering—in this memory—I went to the restroom after a couple of watery draft beers. Following me in were two of my old wrestling teammates, one of whom was at least present for my piss facial a decade before this if not a proud participant in the assault, which I could do nothing about when it happened and would pretend had actually never occurred now. He stood beside me at a stall, and after two or three sentences of small talk, this old teammate, the shorter one of the two, offered this cracker of a conversation starter: "Who are you nailing nowadays?"

I smiled, did some nonverbal-guy-communication shrugging.

"Come on," he said. "Who?"

The other ex-teammate, a six-foot mountain of muscle, whose older brother killed himself in his bedroom with a shotgun when we were kids, mentioned a young woman's name, a person I'd known since second grade.

"No way," said the short one. "She's out of your league."

No, I told him, having no interest in revealing anything about myself. I didn't have a serious girlfriend (not true), was busy (not entirely true), going to school (true), etc.

The mountain of muscle said he'd really like to run into her somewhere quiet, the young woman mentioned, knowing that I had once been close friends with this person. [End Page...