I continued to hyperventilate my way through the wrestling season. I hyperventilated in Cortland, hyperventilated again in Waterloo, then hyperventilated again at Holland Patent. (They nearly called an ambulance for me in Holland Patent.) Along the way, I had the opportunity to perform thorough inspections of the rafters of all the gymnasiums in the Central and Eastern New York State areas. Night after night I stood next to referees who raised my opponents’ arms. The thing they never tell you about the arm-raising thing is this: the referee not only holds up one guy’s arm, but he also sort of…
The night of my first wrestling match I walked out of the locker room wearing my singlet and my robe, wondering if there would be any Rocky-like theme music to accompany my entrance. (There was not.) The gym had never felt colder, never seemed quieter or more cavernous than it did that night. The rafters seemed impossibly far away. In the center of the gym was a large blue wrestling mat with a white circle painted on it. (more…)
I survived the terrible wrestling practices–which remain, without a doubt, among the most painful events I have endured in my lifetime, bar none. I survived the ubiquitous nudity. I survived the terrible locker room smells. And, on the day of our first match, I survived the weigh-in, which took place in the morning, in the dark, before school started, because, as the coach explained to us, people for some reason always weigh less in the morning than they do at any other time in the day. Weighing in was a mere formality for me. I weighed 190 pounds, but I…
I quickly discovered that wrestling was a much more intimate sport than football was. Instead of going outdoors to a breezy, hundred yard-long field for practice, you went into the school’s smallest, darkest, most claustrophobic room. Instead of wearing a uniform that was so bulky and dehumanizing you needed to iron the names of the players onto the back in order to tell them apart, you wore a thin piece of spandex and cotton (a singlet) that left nothing to the imagination. When the equipment manager handed me my singlet for the first time, I felt like a showgirl in…
[New here? Get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I’m playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days.] There was a brief period of time–one week, maybe two–in high school when I was known as “The Hero.” “Hey everyone, here comes The Hero!” people would say. Or, “Make way for The Hero!” Or, “Ha, ha, The Hero is having spaghetti for lunch today!” No kidding, people said these things to me. And when they weren’t saying these things to me, they were slapping me on the back, or delivering high-fives, or stopping me between classes so that I…
[If you’re new here, 1. welcome, friend, 2. get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I’m playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days.] The overheated lobby of the Holiday Inn Express at three in the morning smelled like a ghost had just finished smoking a cigarette then promptly peeled and enjoyed a mandarin orange afterward. Now that I think about it, that’s one more descriptor I’d like to see in advertisements for hotels: “clean,” “simple,” “no bulls***,” “you will not get bedbugs,” and “no cigarette-smoking, orange-eating ghosts live here.” I gave the tired eyed…
[If you’re new here, 1. welcome, friend; 2. get yourself up to speed by going back to Day 1 where I explain why I’m playing 101 levels of Donkey Kong in 101 days. You good? OK. Let’s move on.] The plane finally reached the gate in Syracuse at around 2:30 in the morning. After the majesty of the United terminal at O’Hare in Chicago–the soaring glass and steel ceilings, the bona fide brontosaurus skeleton, the Coach leather goods store which sold handbags which cost as much as a used Honda–it was difficult to reconcile where I’d been two hours earlier with the threadbare carpeting…
Fact: Airplanes bound for Syracuse are always about as small and old as airplanes can get. That night’s plane out of Chicago was no exception. Picture a tube approximately 20 feet in length, with single seats on the left and pairs of seats on the right. As I walked down the aisle in search of my seat, I began hunching myself until I was practically doubled over, looking less like a man in search of seat 11A and more like I was experiencing severe gastrointestinal pain. Even Frodo Baggins would have felt claustrophobic inside this godforsaken thing. (more…)
As soon as we learned that the flight to Syracuse would be cancelled, everyone, like beavers in the wild, promptly began building what appeared to be little campsites in the gate area. Rolled-up jackets became pillows; newspapers and magazines functioned as makeshift blankets. One man, lucky enough to have an actual blanket with him, stretched it between two banks of chairs, fashioning a cozy tarp for himself and his wife. It was impossible not to be jealous of them. Two people had a terse exchange after one person’s newspaper-blanket crept over into the “campsite” staked out by another person. [caption…
I love landing in Chicago. Changing planes always blows for a million different reasons. But if you have to change planes, and I mean have to, this is the place you want to do it. O’Hare is modern and clean. It’s easy to navigate. There are plenty of good food options. And, best of all, the United terminal features a bona fide dinosaur skeleton.
