Slurpee Summer of '73

The guy is sitting next to me on the Metro, not standing behind a counter. He's reading a book, not cracking a fresh roll of quarters and camouflaging himself in the green, orange and red of an American institution.

It's the same uneasy feeling I get from thinking of Batman doing his laundry. This guy is wearing a 7-11 cashier's smock. But he's not in a 7-11. It's throwing me off a little.

It just seems a little out of context. Not as much as, say, running into your third grade teacher at the Love Pantry, but you know, weirdish.

I've always been a pretty big fan of the old Seven-E, the original convenience store. Need some bread, milk and nasal spray? Got you covered.

How about a pepperoni stick with that eight pack of Crayolas?

There was a period, I'm thinking sometime during the Nineties, when 7-11 advertised hot dogs by weight, like "Try or ninety-nine cent quarter pounder hot dog."

Oh, thank heavens no.

And who can ignore the store's signature, its slushy symbol of nuclear colored refreshment—the Slurpee. Across the land, people  of all creeds have bellied up to the inexpensive wellspring of sugar, ice and toxic coloring.

Males in my hometown, often representing the three prevalent ethnicities (stoners, jocks and stoner jocks) hoisted countless toasts together under the flickering, fluorescent tubes.

Every morning that summer of 1973, I'd stumble downstairs and into the dining room to discover what my teenager brother had abandoned on the table. Salivating like a crazed basset hound, I slid along the table on my elbows, pinning my face an inch from the artist's rendering.

Sometimes it was Willy Mays or Hank Aaron. One morning Lou Piniella, his boyish head capped in Kansas City Royal blue, sat waiting for a nice rinse-out. Other mornings, duds like Richie Hebner or Steve Blass would stare back at me, but either way, I'd walk to the sink, purge the watery Slurpee Seconds from the bottom and add it to the growing queue on my windowsill.

Okay, this is where you imagine that the guy who says the next sentence is Keith Morrison from Dateline NBC.

But it wasn't until forty years later that a chilling secret was revealed.

My brother, in a rare moment of lucidity, informed me that he'd fully intended to repossess the cups that summer. The local 7-11 had been publicizing a contest where the first person to collect the entire collection of Major League Baseball Slurpee cups would win an AM radio shaped like a couple of big dice.

Neat, huh?

My brother didn't win, but finished only five cups short of the radio. He insisted that had he won the contest, he'd have snagged those babies out of my room like a prison guard who'd just pulled the lid off a toilet full of raisin jack. Our fragile peace would have splintered and I would have been forced to wage a guerrilla war, seizing his comic books as bargaining chips in the holy war he'd chosen to incite.

No winners there, only broken lives.

Even now, an uneasy truce hovers between us. And while I trust this man implicitly with my own children, I could no more allow him around my Slurpee cups than ask Limbaugh to deliver a vanload of porn and Percocet.

That's why they're tucked safely away down in the basement. I think.

We All Do It, So Why Get Rid of It?

How can they do this?

How the hell can these folks eliminate one of the few activities in which every human being and many in our animal kingdom joyfully partake?

I'm not kidding here; if somehow I were able to list each person I either currently know or with whom I've been even faintly familiar throughout my fifty-year run, I would feel cockily confident in jotting a solid check mark next to each moniker with a fragrant black Sharpie.

Because everyone has done this.

Before delving much further, let me clarify a bit. This activity does not derive its inspiration from the smudged pages of Titanic Teats Monthly or the 2007 Shirtless Sheriffs of Shreveport Fundraising Calendar. I'm also not referring to any act which demands that your free hand choose either the mouse or keyboard.

So, yeah, shuffle on out of that dark theater in your mind and wipe away those filthy thoughts with a moist, flushable towelette, mmkay there, PeeWee?

Because I'm talking about wrestling. It's been nixed from the 2020 Olympic Games by the International Olympic Committee. Can you freaking believe this?

Holy ears of cauliflower, how can the most fundamental contest of physical domination be so callously hurled onto the Olympic scrap heap, joining croquet, tug-of-war, some game called mushu and, get this—solo synchronized swimming.

Solo synchronized swimming? Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you consider anything you do alone synchronized?

From the moment that fleshy cord is cut and the post partum goo is squeegeed from our pink little bodies, our wrestling days commence. Our mothers and fathers bury their faces in our warm, soft bellies, inciting cackles and coos.

Everyone grapples, from humans to rodents to single-celled protoplasma. So why would a cold cadre of silver haired killjoys slam down the kibosh on such a universal practice?

Of all the accolades bestowed upon our planet's athletes, I can think of none more coveted than winning an Olympic Gold Medal in Wrestling, an opportunity to stand atop the winner's podium, squinting tearfully as our national anthem belts out its familiar refrains, flush with the knowledge that I can drive the scapulae of any bastard who comes my way into the MRSA-soaked mat.

It would heal so many wounds, so very many.

As a child, I wrestled involuntarily. It's not like my big brother ever requested my presence on the mats for a fair and square scrap. Nope, by the time he'd thrown me down and pinned my arms to the floor with his knees, I usually had it figured out. Until I witnessed more organized meets, I'd always believed that painful tickling, poking, slapping and hovering stringy globs of saliva just above my sun-bleached donkey teeth were rules sanctioned by wrestling's official governing body.

After a substantial growth spurt, I joined the wrestling team in the eighth grade. I actually hated it. It was a rough, stinky sport, one in which I was pinned by every opponent.

On one rare occasion against a guy from Meeker Junior High, however, I was doing well and victory actually seemed within reach.

And reach I did. I shot my open hand between my adversary's legs and filled my palm with nothing but his delicately forming scrotum and testicles. He got sort of angry at that point.

I felt like I'd just taken part in the Scared Straight-San Quentin Shower Day unit. All energy instantly leeched out of my grasp and my opponent soon pressed my back to the mat like he'd narrowly escaped being shanked by the new transfer.

Fortunately, accidental twig and berry palpation aside, I learned some wonderful and highly painful joint manipulation skills to exact the revenge on my brother I'd been longing for with a Charles-Bronson-like passion.

I patiently awaited his preemptive strike, which I knew he'd attempt when I was most vulnerable. He attacked me right in the middle of The Bob Newhart Show one Saturday night, but  I know he immediately regretted it when I flipped him, grating his elbow in the shallow pile of our shag carpet.

Within seconds, my sibling lay prone with his pristine underbelly and face exposed. At that point, his only defenses were impotent head butts and name calling.

Ah, the sweet nectar of a lifelong foe forever vanquished.

Most of us just love wrestling with each other, men and women alike. Just to to make sure the fairer sex are also on board, however, I'm going to see what I can find on Youtube in a second. 

I hope it's not too late to reverse this ridiculous and rash decision by the International Olympic Committee. You guys had better be careful.

The Pope has already resigned in protest.