Friends,
Alli and I are almost halfway done with our time in Pittsburgh. The third of six semesters is soon coming to a close, and all that’s left after that is to finish my novel, then somehow become famous enough to hang out with people like Mark Twain and Dante and Homer in all required high school textbooks, and rich enough to buy ice cream for all of Norwalk and Downey, because it can get pretty hot out there.
All of our friends who are not in Pittsburgh, it seems, are parents. By the end of this month alone, there will have been three more births: Babies Ellison, Hartenburg, and Vasquez, in that order. We recently found out, too, that there is one more on the way, coming sometime in July—Baby Brady—which, since this baby is not only friend but family, makes us especially happy to think about. This means that baby fever is spreading, and Alli and I are not sure how immune to it we are. Lately we have been talking about names, even though there is no embryonic analogue. We have names enough now for our first fourteen or fifteen children, give or take, be they boys or girls or a little bit of both. This means we are very nerdy, as this conversation has recently taken up quite a lot of our time; soon we’ll start researching Car & Driver’s top five minivan picks. We have an interview next week at White & Privileged Preschool, hoping that our future child will qualify as "white enough" for their tastes.
Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and we are going to spend it with the Morrises, who live around the corner. The two Morris children—Jillian Rose and Hillary Jane—are two very beautiful parts of our lives out here, proof that being around children is a gift, and reminders that we are missing out by not being in California. Alli and I are grateful to have spent time around them, to have their love and trust, to be people they like to have around. But then we think of the children now being raised in our family, the children of our brothers and sisters, of the time we are not spending in California, and we feel sad to be away, because our nephews and nieces bring our family together in unimaginable ways; they are a natural source of happiness, and to be loved by them makes you a very lucky person. So now then: even though (or perhaps because) we’re far away, Alli and I would like to express our loving thanks this year for family, for in their absence we forget how trying they can be, and only remember the good stuff—which, like we said, we’re thankful for. The rest you can keep.
Here is a confession: Alli and I have a favorite wrestler. His name, by God, is Joey Quervo—they call him "The Drunken Luchador"—and he is one of the stars of the Keystone State Wrestling Alliance. According to his profile, he hails from Tijuana, Mexico. Apparently, though, Joey recently entered 12-step recovery, which was a tough transition for Señor Quervo, first because they can no longer really call him The Drunken Luchador—and a loss of identity is hard for anyone; but, more importantly, he hasn’t won a match since he got sober—because now he actually feels the pain of being thrown around a wrestling ring. In his last bout he didn’t last more than two minutes before he was pinned, disgracefully, by someone he outweighed by more than fifty pounds. Before, when he was still drinking the tequila, he could get a chair smashed over his head, drive into a tree, fall from a balcony three stories up, and walk away laughing, saying, Man, èse, whattabahmmer, thattagohna hhurrt mañana. We expect him to relapse any day now, if only to regain his wrestling abilities, and with them his KSWA honor.
Yes, by the way, what you are thinking is true: Alli and I have actually gone to watch these wrestlers wrestle.
And, yes—we love it.
We saw "Zero," and "Ali Kaida," and "Biker Al," and "’Mister Devastation’ Lou Martin," and many others. There was beer and screaming and dollar hot dogs and they raffled off a gift certificate to WalMart. You heard me: WalMart. (Please understand that while I do know that that is funny, I mean it’s really really funny, and that it should not appear in a true email but in a Saturday Night Live skit—it is still true. Someone actually, and gratefully, won a small shopping spree at the WalMart. I, too, have a difficult time believing it.)
The events are monthly, and they take place over the hill from us in a small banquet room called The Moose. Yes, the Moose. They set up a ring in the middle of this room—the kind of place you’d hold an Over-Forty Single’s Dance for women named Wilma and men named Burt, or have a wedding reception in (if your budget is around thirty bucks), and when you walk in, you walk straight back into 1979, into a Bad News Bears sequel: the women have feathered hair, feathered blonde hair with dark roots, and their husbands are already cross-eyed by the booze, and they’re smoking a cigarette in one hand and holding a baby in the other. Young men with an "Is that a mustache or dirt on your lip?" and the "I’ve never shaved these nine hairs on my chin that curl over one another, and yeah—what’s your problem?—I call this a goatee" take their dates here, sit in the front row and drink ten beers and barely resist the temptation to fight each other, and yes, their dates are excited to finally get out, to be taken to a show. The winner of the 50-50 raffle—we’ll call her Dora—who brought her son and three of his friends all at ten bucks a pop (and who had been recognized by the announcer of the raffle as one of KSWA’s old time regulars, one of the loyal, the proud), told us afterwards that she had been laid off seven months prior, and was grateful for having won the money. She seemed nice, but she did not seem like she’d use that money to do anything other than buy more raffle tickets next month.
Take a look through the website; visit the Profiles section, the Title History, the Picture Gallery. Notice that the hometown of Ali Kaida is "Saudi Arabia" but you know he was born and raised in the heart of Pittsburgh, that "Justin Sane"’s hometown is the "Pittsburgh Mental Hospital" and that "Zero" (the only wrestler who actually took off his shirt—and who just should not have bothered, with his tiny nipples and his snow-white skin) looks like he should instead be driving a really bitchin’ mini-pickup truck, showing up for Prom drinking orange juice spiked with the only liquor in his house—Coors Light. There’s a guy called the "Blood Beast," and when he came out to wrestle, the group of guys behind us yelled out, "Hey, Satan! Your haircut could be much more evil!" This is a very small room for a wrestling match, and the Blood Beast heard them, and was embarrassed, and I think he was insecure about his mid-to-late-thirties balding up on top, which really isn’t very evil, when you think about it.
My main questions are these: What do you tell your new girlfriend when she asks why you won’t take her out on Saturday nights? –No, sorry, honey, it’s just that I, I, I…am a semi-professional wrestler. Or worse: –No, sorry, honey, it’s just that I, I, I…am a semi-professional wrestling referee. How do you go about auditioning to become a semi-pro wrestler? When in God’s name did the idea enter their minds? Were they playing video games one day, just barely beating Hulk Hogan on level sixteen, and suddenly they thought, Yeah, dude, yeah, like, I could do that for real! These guys don’t look like they work out much—actually, they look like they hang out in places called Sonny’s Tavern most hours of most days…and I mean, it’s really a bunch of George Castanzas out there, hoping we don’t notice their pitiful shortcomings, hoping instead that we notice that really cool pile driver. They have hair in very weird places, and they don’t bother to shave—or wax—those very weird places. For the life of me, I cannot imagine their minds, cannot sympathize with their aspirations to become Pittsburgh’s "World" Heavy Weight Wrestling Champion.
At one point during the night, Alli excused herself to the restroom, and when she came back she told me the sad story of a little girl in there with what seemed to be her mother, and the little girl was weeping, was inconsolable, tears were everywhere, and mommy was rubbing her back saying, No, sweetie, it’s okay…Daddy is only pretending. –Now I wonder which wrestler’s daughter that was. Was it the Latin Assassin’s daughter? "The King" Del Douglas’s daughter? I know it wasn’t Kris Kash’s daughter, who couldn’t be more than sixteen years old—and who, incidentally, weighing in at only 120 pounds, somehow pinned Baracus, who weighs 215.
In some of the pictures on the website, you’ll notice the panels of the ceiling, as though The Moose had been originally intended to be filled with office cubicles, something which really ruins the fantasy of the whole thing—because their presence means that the wrestlers cannot fly across the ring from the top rope. They must instead jump down—and not out and up—as though they were children at a swimming pool, learning to dive. Many a suplex was interrupted by an accidentally kicked ceiling panel, and this was just plain sad.
But, in the end, it was fantastic. During the title bout, Anthony "Double A" Alexander took the fight out into the street, leaving the arena area, and, coming back in, was still punching away and bruising up the champion, "The Enforcer" Shawn Blanchard. They had taken the fight from the ring and into the crowd, jumping off the bar and into each other—chairs were thrown, beer was spilled, and everybody went wild. At one point I stopped laughing and began to cheer, screaming with everyone else, Dou-ble-A! Dou-ble-A! Dou-ble-A! The lady in front of me, old and with her granddaughters, smiled at me with all six of her teeth, and we shared a moment I will never forget. Here we were, together, all of us, our voices lifted like drunken angels, uniting over Double A’s possible assent to the championship, and would he? Could he? Could he muster up the strength, the stamina, the courage—could he?—to beat that big jerk Shawn Blanchard? We looked at each other, Six-Tooth and I, and I smiled back at her, my arms raised to the sky, hoping, believing—Yes! I think he’s going to do it! I think he might, I think that he just might be able to…!
We’re going back next month for the rematch.
It was a night I hope to remember for a very long time.
Happy Thanksgiving. We love and miss you very much.
Carlos
Alli and I are almost halfway done with our time in Pittsburgh. The third of six semesters is soon coming to a close, and all that’s left after that is to finish my novel, then somehow become famous enough to hang out with people like Mark Twain and Dante and Homer in all required high school textbooks, and rich enough to buy ice cream for all of Norwalk and Downey, because it can get pretty hot out there.
All of our friends who are not in Pittsburgh, it seems, are parents. By the end of this month alone, there will have been three more births: Babies Ellison, Hartenburg, and Vasquez, in that order. We recently found out, too, that there is one more on the way, coming sometime in July—Baby Brady—which, since this baby is not only friend but family, makes us especially happy to think about. This means that baby fever is spreading, and Alli and I are not sure how immune to it we are. Lately we have been talking about names, even though there is no embryonic analogue. We have names enough now for our first fourteen or fifteen children, give or take, be they boys or girls or a little bit of both. This means we are very nerdy, as this conversation has recently taken up quite a lot of our time; soon we’ll start researching Car & Driver’s top five minivan picks. We have an interview next week at White & Privileged Preschool, hoping that our future child will qualify as "white enough" for their tastes.
Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and we are going to spend it with the Morrises, who live around the corner. The two Morris children—Jillian Rose and Hillary Jane—are two very beautiful parts of our lives out here, proof that being around children is a gift, and reminders that we are missing out by not being in California. Alli and I are grateful to have spent time around them, to have their love and trust, to be people they like to have around. But then we think of the children now being raised in our family, the children of our brothers and sisters, of the time we are not spending in California, and we feel sad to be away, because our nephews and nieces bring our family together in unimaginable ways; they are a natural source of happiness, and to be loved by them makes you a very lucky person. So now then: even though (or perhaps because) we’re far away, Alli and I would like to express our loving thanks this year for family, for in their absence we forget how trying they can be, and only remember the good stuff—which, like we said, we’re thankful for. The rest you can keep.
Here is a confession: Alli and I have a favorite wrestler. His name, by God, is Joey Quervo—they call him "The Drunken Luchador"—and he is one of the stars of the Keystone State Wrestling Alliance. According to his profile, he hails from Tijuana, Mexico. Apparently, though, Joey recently entered 12-step recovery, which was a tough transition for Señor Quervo, first because they can no longer really call him The Drunken Luchador—and a loss of identity is hard for anyone; but, more importantly, he hasn’t won a match since he got sober—because now he actually feels the pain of being thrown around a wrestling ring. In his last bout he didn’t last more than two minutes before he was pinned, disgracefully, by someone he outweighed by more than fifty pounds. Before, when he was still drinking the tequila, he could get a chair smashed over his head, drive into a tree, fall from a balcony three stories up, and walk away laughing, saying, Man, èse, whattabahmmer, thattagohna hhurrt mañana. We expect him to relapse any day now, if only to regain his wrestling abilities, and with them his KSWA honor.
Yes, by the way, what you are thinking is true: Alli and I have actually gone to watch these wrestlers wrestle.
And, yes—we love it.
We saw "Zero," and "Ali Kaida," and "Biker Al," and "’Mister Devastation’ Lou Martin," and many others. There was beer and screaming and dollar hot dogs and they raffled off a gift certificate to WalMart. You heard me: WalMart. (Please understand that while I do know that that is funny, I mean it’s really really funny, and that it should not appear in a true email but in a Saturday Night Live skit—it is still true. Someone actually, and gratefully, won a small shopping spree at the WalMart. I, too, have a difficult time believing it.)
The events are monthly, and they take place over the hill from us in a small banquet room called The Moose. Yes, the Moose. They set up a ring in the middle of this room—the kind of place you’d hold an Over-Forty Single’s Dance for women named Wilma and men named Burt, or have a wedding reception in (if your budget is around thirty bucks), and when you walk in, you walk straight back into 1979, into a Bad News Bears sequel: the women have feathered hair, feathered blonde hair with dark roots, and their husbands are already cross-eyed by the booze, and they’re smoking a cigarette in one hand and holding a baby in the other. Young men with an "Is that a mustache or dirt on your lip?" and the "I’ve never shaved these nine hairs on my chin that curl over one another, and yeah—what’s your problem?—I call this a goatee" take their dates here, sit in the front row and drink ten beers and barely resist the temptation to fight each other, and yes, their dates are excited to finally get out, to be taken to a show. The winner of the 50-50 raffle—we’ll call her Dora—who brought her son and three of his friends all at ten bucks a pop (and who had been recognized by the announcer of the raffle as one of KSWA’s old time regulars, one of the loyal, the proud), told us afterwards that she had been laid off seven months prior, and was grateful for having won the money. She seemed nice, but she did not seem like she’d use that money to do anything other than buy more raffle tickets next month.
Take a look through the website; visit the Profiles section, the Title History, the Picture Gallery. Notice that the hometown of Ali Kaida is "Saudi Arabia" but you know he was born and raised in the heart of Pittsburgh, that "Justin Sane"’s hometown is the "Pittsburgh Mental Hospital" and that "Zero" (the only wrestler who actually took off his shirt—and who just should not have bothered, with his tiny nipples and his snow-white skin) looks like he should instead be driving a really bitchin’ mini-pickup truck, showing up for Prom drinking orange juice spiked with the only liquor in his house—Coors Light. There’s a guy called the "Blood Beast," and when he came out to wrestle, the group of guys behind us yelled out, "Hey, Satan! Your haircut could be much more evil!" This is a very small room for a wrestling match, and the Blood Beast heard them, and was embarrassed, and I think he was insecure about his mid-to-late-thirties balding up on top, which really isn’t very evil, when you think about it.
My main questions are these: What do you tell your new girlfriend when she asks why you won’t take her out on Saturday nights? –No, sorry, honey, it’s just that I, I, I…am a semi-professional wrestler. Or worse: –No, sorry, honey, it’s just that I, I, I…am a semi-professional wrestling referee. How do you go about auditioning to become a semi-pro wrestler? When in God’s name did the idea enter their minds? Were they playing video games one day, just barely beating Hulk Hogan on level sixteen, and suddenly they thought, Yeah, dude, yeah, like, I could do that for real! These guys don’t look like they work out much—actually, they look like they hang out in places called Sonny’s Tavern most hours of most days…and I mean, it’s really a bunch of George Castanzas out there, hoping we don’t notice their pitiful shortcomings, hoping instead that we notice that really cool pile driver. They have hair in very weird places, and they don’t bother to shave—or wax—those very weird places. For the life of me, I cannot imagine their minds, cannot sympathize with their aspirations to become Pittsburgh’s "World" Heavy Weight Wrestling Champion.
At one point during the night, Alli excused herself to the restroom, and when she came back she told me the sad story of a little girl in there with what seemed to be her mother, and the little girl was weeping, was inconsolable, tears were everywhere, and mommy was rubbing her back saying, No, sweetie, it’s okay…Daddy is only pretending. –Now I wonder which wrestler’s daughter that was. Was it the Latin Assassin’s daughter? "The King" Del Douglas’s daughter? I know it wasn’t Kris Kash’s daughter, who couldn’t be more than sixteen years old—and who, incidentally, weighing in at only 120 pounds, somehow pinned Baracus, who weighs 215.
In some of the pictures on the website, you’ll notice the panels of the ceiling, as though The Moose had been originally intended to be filled with office cubicles, something which really ruins the fantasy of the whole thing—because their presence means that the wrestlers cannot fly across the ring from the top rope. They must instead jump down—and not out and up—as though they were children at a swimming pool, learning to dive. Many a suplex was interrupted by an accidentally kicked ceiling panel, and this was just plain sad.
But, in the end, it was fantastic. During the title bout, Anthony "Double A" Alexander took the fight out into the street, leaving the arena area, and, coming back in, was still punching away and bruising up the champion, "The Enforcer" Shawn Blanchard. They had taken the fight from the ring and into the crowd, jumping off the bar and into each other—chairs were thrown, beer was spilled, and everybody went wild. At one point I stopped laughing and began to cheer, screaming with everyone else, Dou-ble-A! Dou-ble-A! Dou-ble-A! The lady in front of me, old and with her granddaughters, smiled at me with all six of her teeth, and we shared a moment I will never forget. Here we were, together, all of us, our voices lifted like drunken angels, uniting over Double A’s possible assent to the championship, and would he? Could he? Could he muster up the strength, the stamina, the courage—could he?—to beat that big jerk Shawn Blanchard? We looked at each other, Six-Tooth and I, and I smiled back at her, my arms raised to the sky, hoping, believing—Yes! I think he’s going to do it! I think he might, I think that he just might be able to…!
We’re going back next month for the rematch.
It was a night I hope to remember for a very long time.
Happy Thanksgiving. We love and miss you very much.
Carlos
posted by Carlos Antonio Delgado at 12:21 PM
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