A Second Chance at My First Time

"And I will kiss you on the forehead, and everything with you will be as it should be."

He had won a prestigious writing fellowship, this friend of a friend of a friend, because people read his work. No one, not even my harshest critic or my secret sharer, had ever bothered to read mine. It was pure gene yuss, though…of this you can rest assured. But if you can’t get past the first paragraph—and research shows 99.6% of readers don’t, even when the book is as good as Kate Upton’s Game of War and Peace—you’ll never discover what you’re missing.

I turned to Camden, whom I might have been dating at the time, and tried to muster as determined a look as a beaten-down, can’t-win-for-losing sadsack such as myself could manage. “So here’s what I’m going to do, baby: I’m going to write an entire book of amazing opening paragraphs,” I said.

She looked up from her Sega Game Gear, on which she had led Sonic and his fox friend Tails past the dreaded Green Hill Zone #1. “What did you just call me?” she asked.

"I called you ‘lady,’ because you’re such a pretty lady,” I lied, hoping that my killer Jerry Lewis impression would compensate for my pathetic attempt to assert my masculine bona fides.

"Okay, whatever," she said, returning to her game. "I need to get these last couple of rings or I’m screwed."

The hardest part about the past, at least for me, is that you’re in so much of it.

"Do you like that one? That one’s about you, Camden," I explained as she continued to furiously push buttons in a futile effort to put that egg-sucking dog Dr. Robotnik in his place.

"Sure, Oscar. You do what you think is right," she said. I marveled at how she was able to drive a car while keeping neither a hand on the steering wheel nor a single eye on the road. She was gifted, my Camden, my baby.

My birthday present for turning sixteen was a wild night of sex with my half-sister. After seven minutes in heaven, I wondered why it had taken me this long.

"This one’s a bit on the racy side," I continued, "but I think that fans of my work on literotica.com might like it."

"Keep going in that direction," mumbled Camden. "It’s ambitious and it’s definitely a story I know is from you."

Of all the people I ever knew, John Wilkes Booth wasn’t one of them. But I felt like I should know him; I felt the world owed me this much. This was just one of many things I felt in my heart.

"Historical fiction is always a popular genre, Cammy. Don’t you agree?"

"Did you call me Cammy, Oscar? You didn’t just do that, did you?"

"No, no," I stammered, racking my brain for an acceptable excuse. "No, we just passed a Denny’s and I wanted to see if you’d like to stop and get a Moons Over My Hammy. It’s a heck of a sandwich, one of America’s best. That’s why they call it the ‘Taste of America.’"

"People call it that? All the food there tastes like sawdust and angel tears, Oscar. Aw fuck, I completely messed up that jump. Is my Ecco the Dolphin cartridge in the glove department?"

I reached in and retrieved the game. I’d never liked Ecco—I thought most of its missions were long and tedious, and I’ve always hated the sea—but I respected its staying power. Like Sonic and Tails in Dr. Robotnik’s Revenge 2, here was a game that had withstood the ravages of time…and then some.

Eddy “Flap” Jacks eased his droopy, shit-stained wrestling trunks over his enormous grandpa ass, in the process obscuring a field of carbuncles and abscesses that had left me and a few of the other boys in the locker room feeling sick to our stomachs.

"Jesus christ, Eddy, what are you going out there for fifty bucks for? You need it that badly?" asked Steve "The Fury" Kowalski, another battered old fart of a wrestler who continued to take bookings in spite of fused vertebra and worsening dementia that most of us assumed was due to untreated late-stage syphillis.

Jacks, who had been rubbing bacon fat all over his sloppy gut and man-boobs, hoisted a trunk-like thigh onto the bench near where I was changing, thus affording me an unforgettable glimpse of the distended testicles that accompany an inguinal hernia. “Fuck you, Kowalski, I’m gonna go out my way,” he replied.

"C’mon, dad, you’re wrestling the opening match and you’re booked to lose to ‘Gentleman’ Timothy N. Turner," I interrupted. "You need to finish up these bookings and maybe get that eye looked, maybe spend some time on the farm relaxing and enjoying retirement."

Jacks rested his elbow on his upraised knee and his chin on his fist, a thoughtful pose that highlighted the old man’s many bone spurs and other deformities. “Shaddup, Junior, I never was too big a guy to say no to a job. I’m putting TNT over, that’s all. I put everybody over. ‘Cowboy’ Ken Curtis, ‘Outlaw’ J.W. Hardin, ‘Grizzly’ Gaines. I main-evented the Garden against Gaines, and we drew $40k.”

"Yeah, forty years ago," laughed Kowalski. "The only thing people today know you for is how when you were wrestling on that IWF pay-per-view and Dan Kauffman went to body-slam you, you shit your pants."

Jacks shrugged. “Christ, I’d been leaking for weeks, Steve, and I know should’ve used an enema before that match, but I figured what the haystacks. The promoters got a lot of mileage out of that, anyway.”

"The ‘brown streak,’" I said. "Mom and I thought you should’ve quit then. You did okay business up there for a little while."

"They’ll have to carry your old man out, junior," Kowalski said. "He’s gonna die with his boots on, and not just because he can’t pull them off over those corns he’s got."

"I just want to go out on my terms," insisted Jacks. "I’m 71 years old…"

"You’re 75," I corrected him.

"I’m 71 and I just want to have that spotlight come down on me one final time, and then I hit a move, maybe my big splash, and that’s my second to last move, I’m almost out of moves…then my last move is to the grave."

Eddy Jacks, my father, was blind in one eye because he had contracted trachoma from a filthy wrestling mat in Poughkeepsie in early 1940 and refused antibiotics. He underwent a couple of bluestone treatments, and they succeeded in burning the eye pretty badly, but his condition only worsened over the years.

Eddy Jacks, my father, had been the champion of the world for six weeks in 1964 and five days in 1971. He was always too late or too soon or too much or too little for the promoters who booked him. For a brief while, he seemed destined to be a top guy; he had the college football background and was pretty sharp on the mic. Now he was just too old, too far gone.

Eddy Jacks, my father, wasn’t much of my father for the thirty years he ostensibly served in that role. Toward the end of his life, as my own career in the sport was trending to the upper midcard and eventually a substantial backstage role, he took to playing that role on local-access, UHF-band television. “I taught him everything he knows, but not everything I know,” he would say, and then we’d wrestle a tag team match where I did all of the work and also took the pinfall.

Eddy Jacks, my father, stood in front of me and the rest of the boys whose guts he had always hated: gross, fat, and nearly dead. This would be his last night on earth. Someone up there must’ve liked him, because he didn’t have to do the job to the dreadful TNT, a feeble and overrated enhancement talent who drifted from territory to territory.

Eddy Jacks, my father, died a few minutes after trading banter with me and Kowalski. He died sitting down on the toilet, which for a variety of reasons he always had to do, and he died with half a smile on his face. I never told him I loved him, not really anyway, but in that moment I realized everything I had achieved was either due to or in spite of him. “I’m dying here,” he shouted from the toilet as he expired, and so he was.

Eddy Jacks, my father, would’ve been proud of me, because I went on with the show. While an ambulance came to pick up his body, I wrestled a washed-up Serge Annis to a time-limit draw in a match for the Great Lakes Television Title. The crowd was pretty dead, but I like to think a few of the chain wrestling sequences I called in the rring were reminiscent of what the original Eddy Jacks would’ve done: rest-holds and such, not much action, working the headlock to lazy perfection. And surely the indeterminate screwjob finish was right up his alley, because if there was one thing my father didn’t believe in, it was closure.

"Life is eternally new, which gets old," I mused aloud as Camden pulled into the parking lot of the Applebee’s Neigbhorhood Bar & Grill where we we doing happy hour with some of her "besties."

"That sounds nice. You should write greeting cards or something," Camden said. "That could be a good job for you. You’re always talking about doing something different, about how what you’re doing is a bad fit or doesn’t challenge you or whatever."

I’d never said anything like that to her, but hey, she could think what she wanted to think. At least she was talking to me instead of at me or over me. “Yeah, I mean, how do you find a job like that?”

"I don’t know," she said. "I’ve never wanted a writing job. But it sounds neat, doesn’t it? It could be a second chance at a first start for you."

She didn’t know what the hell she was talking about—Camden indiscriminately spewed words, never caring what any single one of them meant—but what she had just said was nice. As I tried to push the thought of unlimited boneless wings as far from my mind’s eye as possible, I had to admit that I longed to start over and do everything differently, yet still wrong. It’d always be wrong, because you can’t please any of the people any of the time, but it’d be something else, something I hadn’t experienced, and there’s a lot to be said for that.