SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY in my freshmen year of high school, the wrestling coach found me. Small and wiry and angry, the way I’d been my whole life. I strutted around school like a Thai rooster, not listening to anybody, standing up and walking out of class whenever I felt like it. Not afraid of the upperclassmen like the other freshmen, my brother being one of them. Taking his shit for a decade, I knew that there was nothing behind these kids but a few years and some slick talk. I felt older than them even though I wasn’t. I wasn’t scared of the teachers or the principals either. I felt older than them, too. These were good qualities for wrestling, and the coach used to brag that he had trained Ray Lewis over in Lakeland when Ray was in high school. He said he was just a skinny kid then. No one knew how good he’d be at football, but my coach saw a wrestler in him, an angry lean kid with a chip on his shoulder who went on to win two state championships. He said Ray’s dad was the best wrestler the high school had ever seen, and all Ray cared about was beating his records. So the coach’s eye was good, I guess. I was good, too.
The coach taught math, not PE. He taught ninth-grade geometry, and that was how he found me, gone off some pills, sitting in the back of the class with a lip of Grizzly in, spitting into a cup. Wrestling and geometry — the guy was Greek, and he was ugly like an ancient, too, pot-bellied and snub-nosed. And it seems like he could be a role model or something for me, a coach mentor, but he wasn’t. We were just two separate weirdos; we didn’t have any sort of special relationship. He just taught me how to wrestle and would praise me sometimes in front of the other kids.
In the hot and sweaty room one day after school, he yelled, “Be like him! You know why he’s good?”
We were doing King of the Mat, and I was running through the whole team. Starting at the lowest weight classes and moving up, winner advances. I was 112, had been cutting weight all season, so I was second lightest, and I’d already beaten nine of my teammates, and I was working on my tenth, 171. The room was ninety-five degrees, and the mat didn’t smell like cleaning chemicals anymore; it was streaked with sweat, stripes of it, puddles of it under our dripping clothes, and, in those puddles, the dirt, the bacteria and the fungi, MRSA and ringworm replicating, staphylococcus looking to move from that desolate, inorganic surface into some open wound, some warm living flesh to infect, some skin to build a red, angry civilization across, microbes competing for space, and us — big, fat, and above — competing for space, too.
He said, “He’s good because he’s mean.”
I was bullying my guy, even though he was bigger than me, and I was feeling mean, digging my chin and my elbows in wherever I could. I had Saran Wrap around my stomach, and I was in full sweats, trying to lose weight. I was seeing stars. I was tired, and when I was trying to move the 189 guy on my team, I just couldn’t do it. He cow-catchered me and slid my face across the dirty, sweaty mat, and, from there, nose dug into the rubber foam, I could smell the faint chemical cleaners as they dissolved, and he pinned me, and I slunk back to the wall to rest.
I knew that was only a part of the truth, the mean thing. I was good because I knew certain things intuitively: angles, trigonometry, leverage. I understood simple machines. I understood triangles, how they dictated the moves, how the lines you had to push your opponent on were straight, and the line you had to take to get to him was straight, and the line to pin him was straight, too. Three lines connecting and forming something contained. After cutting weight, after you strip twenty pounds of round fat off your body, you see the body is made up of triangles too, stacked on top of each other and fused together — shoulders to waist, elbow to wrist, head to chest, hip to knees. Veins growing diagonally across my arms and chest, down my calf, and intersecting into one another.
And I understood that wrestling is about hand control. Your hands, obtuse scalene triangles chopping through the space under your body. The whole match is a fight for the other guy’s hands. If you can control them, you draw the angles he travels, and he has no balance and you can do whatever you want. No matter how good you are, if the other guy had your hands, you’d lose. This fact was a sharp and clear reality in tournaments. Burning through early opponents in a tournament, you can tell they don’t know this basic secret. You just grab their wrists and take control. But as soon as you get into the later rounds where the competition is stiffer, the fight for the hands gets hard.
One-third hand control, one-third trig, and one-third meanness. Three periods in a match. Wrestling was the Platonic ideal of fighting. I discovered that every fight I ever got into out in the world was a substitute for this, the real thing.
At a tournament in Jacksonville my junior year, my record was twenty and one, but I hadn’t wrestled anyone good yet. The year before, I was better, even though my record wasn’t. I was locked in then. I was doing the Phoenix House outpatient treatment, and I was passing my drug tests. I had a singleness of purpose. I was swept up in that three-month sweet period, that new relationship period where I was getting everything I wanted. I felt regular, like a regular kid — girlfriend, sports, school, going to parties. All that disappeared in the spring. I started cheating the drug tests, and I got too spread out. And by winter, I was back to being a full-on freak. That is to say, I was back to doing real drugs. I was the two seed going into the two-day tournament. I had been ditching practice, ditching school, ditching my girlfriend. The coke had me light but tired all the time when it wasn’t around. We took a van out from school, stayed in some cheap hotel waiting for the big tournament.
At six in the morning, we all filed into the locker room for the weigh-in; a couple hundred boys lining up by weight class and stripping down to step on the scale. All wrestlers have a similar look. I can spot them a mile away, no matter what they actually look like — white, Black, country, city, long hair, short hair, stocky, lanky, doesn’t matter — they have a volatile, animal vibe like small predators: stoats or coyotes, piranhas. I’d see them in jail, would recognize them as soon as they walked onto the pod. I’d see them in AA, none of the easiness of baseball or basketball players, the clumsiness of football players. We were like jockeys off our horses, uncomfortable and fast. And these big tournaments were like a tour of the state: one match you’d be wrestling some river rat from Palatka or a rabbit-chaser from a trailer in Clewiston, and then next you’d have some corner kid from North Miami who only knew street noise, was probably scared of cicadas or the rustling of leaves. You’d bump up against some fancy kid from the Palm Beach country clubs who had a summer internship, or the son of a strawberry picker in Ruskin. It was like the army. We all lined up and stripped down and stepped to the scale. The ref pushed his hands onto my nails to see if they were too long, pulled my hair a little, ran his knuckles on my face to make sure I didn’t have stubble. Then I stepped on and waited for those little red numbers. I was 112.02 with boxers, and I knew that. I only stepped on the scale to prove it, and then I got off, took my underwear off, and got back on naked. 112.0. I wanted to take time to make sure everyone in my weight class noticed me, that they saw that I knew my body, that I had been cutting. At those weigh-ins, everyone was still tired, scared in their morning nerves. They hadn’t come into themselves yet and wouldn’t until around nine or ten. They’re all jumpy and vulnerable, panicked because of the nudity and the proximity.
I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich after I weighed in, drank a blue Gatorade, ate a banana and an apple. After a week of eating nothing, it all tasted flavorful and sweet, even the runty, cheap apple and the unripe banana.
I burned through everyone on the first day, conserved my energy. Two quick, easy first-round pins. I relaxed and waited for the semis the next morning. Just lay out on the bench and watched over the giant gymnasium. Eight mats spread out over the hardwood, sixteen kids wrestling at once, parents yelling from the bleachers, coaches and teammates in the corners. It was a circus of noise and whistles and school colors.
My mom never came to my matches; the whole sport scared her. She hated it. It was too violent, but I rarely lost, so it must not have been me that she was worried about. She didn’t want to see me win, see me bully another kid, throw him around, put him on the mat. She didn’t want to see what happened when I was in control, when I had someone to ragdoll and choke. My dad, on the other hand, liked to go to these things. It was something about the mass of kids using their bodies, none of the abstract, disembodied word games of socialization that he hated so much. Here we learned more fundamental truths about ourselves and the world, about the mind and body as one instrument, one mechanism. It reminded me of how he was in the summers before I started working, when I was in elementary and middle school, popping up out of nowhere in the middle of June, making me do assignments out of some math workbook he bought at a thrift store. He called it “enrichment.” I don’t know where he got the idea, but I passed his understanding early, to the point where he couldn’t tell if I was solving the problems right or wrong, but he would meticulously check the answers in the back of the book. He would stand there while I jumped through grades, and he would say, You think the Chinese kids are just screwing around all summer? You think they’re afraid of working? You think they’re waiting for someone to hand them whatever they want? I hated it. I hated enrichment like I hated the push-ups and sit-ups he made me do randomly before disappearing back into the vapors of his mind, on the couch or out the front door.
He didn’t come to these tournaments far out of town, so he wasn’t in Jacksonville, but at the ones in Tampa, he would stand quietly in the corner of the gym and watch me. He was a good baseball player when he was younger, but he didn’t know anything about wrestling. That didn’t stop him from hypothesizing, picking up terms, and telling me what I needed to work on. He understood angles, and he understood being mean, but he never mentioned anything about hand control.
Another weigh-in the next morning with a one-pound allowance. In the semis, I had some senior who looked like he had cut as much weight as I did. He had long hair in a skull cap and a couple tattoos. He was strong and manic but dumb. I could tell he wanted to fight me. I thought he was going to be good, but he wasn’t. The first round was just stalking, hand-fighting, and jerking around. Both of us toe to toe and locked up ear to ear. I pulled his head down, and he resisted as hard as he could, so I let go and all his resistance popped him up, and I shot down and double-leg tripped him. As soon as he went down, he bounced up, and we were back ear to ear. I did the same thing again, but when I shot down, I did a low single leg, grabbed his ankle and pushed with my shoulder into his shin, bent his knee straight and forced him down. I climbed his body, half-nelson turned him and thought it was over, but he was strong. He fought me, and I couldn’t pin him, but I could feel him getting tired. He won the coin toss in the second and deferred. I took top and laced my left leg in, chopped his left arm, and tipped him over. I held his arm close to his body, reached down with my right hand, and grabbed his wrist through his crotch. Mean. I cranked it back toward me, and he moved wherever I wanted. I reached my left arm across his face to hold him still while I pinned him twenty seconds into the round.
In the championship, I faced a kid I had heard of. He was a sophomore, and he won state as a freshman. This kid was good — trained year-round, going to wrestling camps and probably gonna get a full ride to some Division I school in the Midwest. I couldn’t place him in the state like the other kids. I’d never heard of his school before, Something Christian, and he looked like he had never been anywhere but on the wrestling mat. He was a blank slate. He was a true philosopher, a boy-king with a pale, round face and vacant blue eyes. He looked weak, no muscle definition, no scars or tattoos, but when I tried to move him, nothing happened. He didn’t do anything in the first period, just figured me out, I guess. He didn’t even smell like anything. I was starting to suck air from pushing so hard; I was sweating and getting worn out. I could see my coach yelling something in the corner of the mat, but I couldn’t hear him. When the period ended and I walked over to him, he just said, “Hand control. Hand control.”
In the second round, the kid was a bishop, a vicar of the wrestling gods, and I was some pagan getting converted in the desert — the cushy, dirty mat on the hardwood gym floor. He won the coin toss and deferred, and I took top. He blocked my leg easily and sat out so fast I didn’t know what happened. He was a reflective surface; everything I threw at him, he just redirected, bounced, and channeled back into me. I was generating all the momentum of the match, and I was the one getting tired. Every time I pushed into him, I pushed myself. Every time I tried to force a turn or a move, I’d end up getting turned or moved. He was the real geometrician. In his heart, he possessed that ancient mathematic truth: that every triangle is just a piece of a circle. He was using sinusoidal functions, period waves, exposing the folly of my triangular thinking, flattening out the lines and curving them, introducing rates and change. He beat me into the laws of the holy unit circle, showed me how they govern every sharp angle. I was running from him, trying to catch my breath, but every angle I tried to cut away from him just radiated out to the curved edge of the ring.
In the third round, he put legs in on me. I was on my hands and knees, and his left leg was wrapped around mine, his ankle grabbing my shin like a hand. He faked like he was reaching for my right arm, so I immediately shifted all my weight to my left side. He baited me, and as soon as I took it, he moved left along with me and rolled me onto my back. Right when he flipped me, the whistle blew. I didn’t know what happened, I hadn’t been pinned, so I stood up confused.
He tech’d me, which is the wrestling mercy rule. If you beat the other guy by fifteen points, the match automatically ends. I hadn’t even been paying attention to the points. He wasn’t sweating. We shook hands, and the ref grabbed his wrist and lifted it. He didn’t look at me or at anyone. He just walked over to his side and put on his pants.
We drove back from Jacksonville, and by the time we got home it was night. I heard about a party way down south of Gandy. It was a Sunday on a long weekend, and after I showered, I biked by the bay on my way there. My head was high chaos, and the night was loud with crickets. I looked out over the still black water as I biked and saw some gentle stirring out there, shark fins breaking the glassy plane. I put my bike up on the railing between the sidewalk and the bay. I looked out expecting to see some bonnetheads eating or fucking, little shovel-faced sharks like the ones my brother and I would catch off the bridge when we were kids. We would grab blue crabs off the barnacled walls and hook them as bait, and we’d catch sharks one after another, as easy as picking fruit. We would pull them out, and then he would put his hand to my chest and tell me to stand back while he finagled the hooks out of their mouths, those gloomy vacuums. He would wiggle the hook and avoid the hundred little sharp teeth around the rim. I would just stand and stare at their eerie alien skin, their gills pulsing fast, those exposed organs, those external lungs — creatures of a different world.
I wanted to call my brother, to mention the wrestling tournament but not talk about it, to talk instead about catching sharks. He loved fishing. He wrote his college application essay on the joys of quiet water, and it was good enough to land him a scholarship to some cold, landlocked school. I wanted to ask him if he missed it, if he wanted to come back for a bit, and when I got up on the railing, I saw it was a full moon and the low tide was lower than usual, and the blue crabs were sitting dumbly in the barnacles, and I wanted to tell him that there was plenty of bait, that they were hitting out there, ruffling the water. But we didn’t have a relationship like that, really. I had his phone number, and he had mine, but we never used them. I looked out over the bonnetheads, but I saw they were actually a huge school of stingrays moving together; the sinewy, slippery wings cutting the surface of the water just looked like shark fins, and their bodies were tan like the sand, and they glowed in the streetlight, shone under the black water as they flopped on top of one another, swimming together like one giant sandpaper organism. Their slick figures were wet the way muscle probably looks wet under skin, steadily washed with blood. I thought about the hassle of catching a stingray, having to put a sandal or a shoe on the tail while you wiggled the hook out of their toothless maws, the way your bait would usually be hanging there, unchewed, just inhaled whole. The low tide stank, sulfurous and fishy, and I looked out over the water and the roiling stingrays, and I thought, What the fuck has any of this ever done for me? I spit one lazy strand of saliva off the seawall, and I fumed; the tidal waters of my heart pulled low, too, by the moon, exposing the barnacles that grew there, the hatred for the bay and school and wrestling and my family, my puny emotions. I hated everything I could see, north to south, east to west, everything I could set my mind on. I looked at the pink-gray clouds moving fast across the night sky, and I wanted to reach my hands up past them and pull the sky down on everything, to suffocate my little life and all the rest of the creatures that lived in the polluted bay. I wanted to see what was left, what was behind it all, what was so precious about any of this shit?
I picked up my bike and got away from that place as fast as I could — the bay, the moon, spooky and swampy, full of ghosts and monsters. I floated under the orange streetlamps, floated and floated, riding my anger like a current, I barely even had to pedal.
At the party, I meant to pick a fight with someone, but I forgot. My ex-girlfriend was there, and I got drunk and tried not to look at her. I stole an Xbox from the guy whose house it was, and I bought some something, it’s not important. Kicked the cycle into gear again, bender and release. I didn’t wrestle another match, quit going to practice, and then school, for good.