Abdullah does Not Speak the Language!

"Zaram, zig-bippity zarash!"

Son Two is at it again, waving that stick dangerously close to my head and muttering
powerful incantations.

"What was that one?" I ask, feeling a sudden strange desire to dance.

"Gorbalblash,” he says.

I cock my eyebrow. And that is...?

“Another confusion spell," he continues. "This one makes someone on the field go crazy
with the desire to break-dance and do somersaults!"

I look at my feet. They were on the field.

"Um, Two?" I ask. "Just theoretically—how would one undo that spell you just cast?"

"It only lasts an hour, daddy," he said.

That’s life with my second son, the fulfillment of my mother’s curse: “I hope you get one
just like you,” she said wearily, many a time.

I never put a spell on her to make her want to break-dance and do somersaults, but I
possibly did keep her hopping from time to time, and I think all of us boys together made her
like professional wrestling, which is not that far from break-dancing in a way. Still, I feel a little
underappreciated as a son. My son is so much fun! If I was anything like that then, well, I don’t
know what.

My older son is constantly rolling his eyes at Two. A perceptive neighbor laughed and
said that the older boy is me, now, the younger son is me as a little boy. This was meant as a
compliment to my older boy (at least) rather than an attempt to swell my ego, no doubt. But I
repeat: I may have been undervalued as a son, both then and now!

Those were different times, though. Back then, dads didn’t do quite as much of the daily
legwork of child-rearing, to put it in the most neutral way possible. Or my dad didn’t, anyway.
And again, my mom had four boys separated by a total of seven years. She didn’t have that much
time or energy for all of our antics. Or many of them, actually.

We made her laugh with our professional wrestling moves, though.

For a couple years there we used to watch “Live Atlanta” professional wrestling almost
every Saturday night. A worried looking Gordon Soley would commentate on the matches and
attempt to interview some of the combatants between bouts. Of course the interviews were more
likely than not interrupted by a wild-eyed manager hurtling up to the desk, bristling with threats
and claims about the power, beauty, or finesse of his retainer, or by another wrestler with, you
know, more of the same—or a three foot two-by-four, the better to accentuate his rhetoric. We
used to imitate them in all their extravagance and idiosyncracies for hours. Even mom found
herself enthralled by that sometimes.

One of our favorites was “Abdullah the Butcher.” He must have weighed 400 pounds,
and aside from his weight he also had exotic African wrestling or karate moves. He simply
bowled over his victims with his mass and then applied shrewd chops that he had learned
somewhere in the heart of darkness. Then later, during the interview, he would twist his head
crazily and roll his eyes in abstract hostility, as Gordon Soley would interview his manager.

“Abdullah!” his manager explained, “does not speak the language!”

No other wrestler ever dared to invade Abdullah’s interviews, but then it was still
impossible for poor Gordon Soley (everybody always addressed or referred to him with both
names, as in: “Listen up, Gordon Soley!”) to get a coherent word out of the interview. Abdullah
did not speak the language, and his manager rarely said anything comprehensible either. And
then there was Abdullah vacantly trying to stick the microphone into his mouth or up to some
other trick. Poor Gordon Soley. Ha ha. What a job that must have been.

A friend of mine saw Abdullah the Butcher in a mall one day and said “Hey, Abdullah!”

“Hey man,” said Abdullah. “‘S-up?”

Perhaps a quicker study of “the language” than he let on?!

Anyway, my mom would listen to us imitating the various wrestlers for hours on end.
She couldn’t always shush us, and where else could she go?

There was a certain... hmm, how do you say? Circularity to the routines. The wrestlers
just didn’t say that much different stuff, and after a while you could see my poor old mother’s
lips moving in synch to our verbalizations. She had em all memorized. Couldn’t help herself I
suppose. Like an obnoxious song stuck in your head.

Four boys! Can you imagine? I dated a woman who was one of eleven, once. Or was it
thirteen? I can’t remember. Maybe no one really knew for sure, anyway. You always lost count
at family reunions, that’s what I remember. Of course her mom was a broken woman and
couldn’t have counted to thirteen by the time I was dating her daughter anyway. She raised em
all, and they were an upstanding group, too. The daughter was a rarely beautiful woman. And
don’t believe that crack about her mother being a broken woman. She could have gone three
rounds with Abdullah and still spoken the language better than he did.
 She might have been unnerved by that thing he did with his mouth, though.

Although come to think of it if she had tried it herself a little more often she might not
have had so many children.

Pure speculation, of course.

My two boys are separated by four years, and they’re total sweetie-pies.

Children have so much energy. You forget what it used to be like, to be so high on
natural energy that you just can’t stop hopping and dancing even long enough to sit (still!) and
eat your (damn) dinner. My older son is more mature now. He’s like a blow-torch. Turn him on
and he’s blazing hot and ready to go. Turn him off and he’s asleep within five minutes. Then,
like clock-work, he’s awake and ready to go by 6:30 a.m., Monday through Friday, Saturday and
Sunday too. There’s no middle with him. He’s either all awake or all asleep, and the transition
between the two states has always been startlingly sudden. It’s instant.

Two has always been more of a challenge in that way. He’s just not as instant as One. He
gets excited by something he sees or is reading, and he can’t stop talking till he works it out. Last
week it was some sort of stick-figure computer game, horrifyingly violent and unacceptably
graphic, of course. I wouldn’t let him play it, but his mom does, so what can you do? If he’s my
mother’s curse on me come true, he is also his mother’s every proscription made before he was
born turned on its head. I can still remember her talking about all the things she would never let a
child do–I think he does them all. I can’t even stop him from talking about the game, much as I’d
like to. And sometimes I would like.

Apparently in this game there are several classes of people, including “natives,”
“speartons” and archers. It was bed time last Thursday night, and Two wanted to discuss the
various advantages and disadvantages of each class. I let him go on for a while, but then I began
to say, “okay, Two, but now it’s time for bed.”

This had the predictable effect (none at all) and soon progressed to “hush, Two!”

“The natives...” he began again, and I finally carried out my threat to leave the room. “No
more!” I said, sternly as I left, and a minute or two later he was sound asleep.

He woke in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and as is usually the case when
he does that I go in to the bathroom after he washes his hands, pick him up, and carry him back
to his bed. As I laid him down into the bed with a kiss this time he spoke to me, eyes closed:
“The advantages of archers, dad...”

“Shhhh,” I whispered. “In the morning.”

He had never really wakened, it was just his brain involuntarily letting off steam. He
didn’t stir again after that until he woke up in the morning.

“Speartons are really the toughest, dad,” he spoke into my ostensibly sleeping ear first
thing the following morning.

“Hmmph?” I muttered, pretending (1) that he had wakened me, and (2) that he had
surprised or confused me. Truth to tell, I was hoping he’d let me go back to sleep. While he tried
to resolve his suddenly powerfully conflicting desires to continue his thought (held in check now
for almost twelve hours) or to apologize for waking me up, I reached out and pulled him under
the covers and into my embrace.

He submitted to my kisses and croons for a minute before continuing. “They can use their
spears from a distance, and then when they get up close they pull out their swords...”

“Like the Roman Legions,” I finally said after one last kiss, still holding him tight. When
I was a boy I remember reading about the Roman Legions. Of course I was in 9th grade by then
reading it in Latin (second year is devoted to Julius Caesar) instead of seven, but I remember
being impressed by the extremely practical and disciplined style of fighting instituted by the
Romans.

“Let’s get up, daddy,” Two said.

Even now, at seven, Two doesn’t usually insist on getting up after only a few hugs and
kisses in the morning. He accepts and relishes parental attention with a savoir faire that I
appreciate immensely. Both my children have such a sophisticated view of physical affection
that if fills me both with pride and envy. I never got much of that, nor did my parents show any
real affection for one another in front of the children.

I can remember the first time I saw two parents kissing passionately: I was 28 years old
visiting a girlfriend. I wanted to marry her, and I often still wish I had married her. We might
have been engaged at the time. Her parents seemed to understand and accept it all from the
beginning. Anyway, the romance and, frankly, hormones, exuding from us during that visit had
their effect on her parents, and one morning we walked into the kitchen and found them making
out!

I was emotionally scarred...

It was the first time I’d ever seen two people I knew as parents making out.

When I returned to school following that trip I found a book I’d had recommended to me:
How to Speak So Kids Listen, and How to Listen So Kids Speak. I don’t remember the author,
unfortunately, but it was one of the most formative books I’ve ever read. I think it’s a large part
of why I’m the parent I became and why children flock to me. If you care about children, this
one is a must-read.

But first I had to figure out why I had never seen two parents making out. And no other
book ever took me as far on that quest, either, although there the lesson was that parents can
never truly pull the wool over their children’s eyes. Everything is recorded, absorbed and
assimilated.

Does it seem to you (reader) that popular culture has been filled with magic? I’m not just
referring to the Harry Potter series or the already endless number of knock-offs, not referring
only to the vast number of network television shows involving magical characters, not even
referring only to the quasi-magical nature of much of the exposition of science you’ll find out
there. I’m referring to the president of the United States, specifically George Bush–but it’s
common to all of them now.

Over the space of two weeks I heard the administration float two purely magical
propositions. The first was to give every new person a “bank account” of $500.00 upon birth.
Whether it was actually a bank account was actually somewhat doubtful, since the supporting
rhetoric suggested that the money would somehow bolster the stock market. Instantly I suspected
this idea of germinating in the all-too-fruitful imagination of the Goldman Sachs boys who seem
to have the exclusive attention of the president on financial matters. Bank accounts are not stock
accounts for anybody else, you know. The proponents of this idea said they thought that the
prospect of coming into a bank account at, say, 21, would create more of a sense of belonging
amongst some of the marginal characters in society. You would bolster the political support
generated by giving the three people on whom this would actually have the desired impact with
bribes to everyone else into the indefinite future.

The second idea was to send “78 million seniors” each checks of $250 some time in the
near future.

Are there 78 million old people in this country? God, we’re old! Or to whom are we
really going to send this money? I’m not sure why we’d be sending them all this money,
although I’ve heard someone suggest rather shrewdly that it was to cover up for the hoax of the
official inflation meter, which apparently showed that there was no inflation that year and hence
Social Security would have no COLA increase. I don’t know.

What is magical about the thinking, though, is the idea that the federal government
somehow exists (in a financial sense) apart from the people of this country. It sends people
checks, it sets up bank accounts, and this money magically appears sui generis and enriches the
recipients (all of us!) with no cost. This follows the similar siphoning of many trillion dollars
into the banks and would be, let us admit, a mere drop in the bucket comparatively.

As a nation we believe in free lunches.

 8

As a child I never believed that Nature Boy Rick Flair could take all that abuse to his
pristine face and never bleed or be scarred. I never believed that Stan Stasiak’s “heart punch”
would really induce a heart attack, although I may at times have tried the technique a little more
enthusiastically on my brothers than was strictly justified by good acting. I didn’t really believe
that the shinny-no-machi would really put my adversary to sleep.

And I didn’t think that Abdullah did not speak the language.

I don’t believe in free lunches now.

When I was in college I heard someone suggest that live professional wrestling was
actually the closest to Greek tragedy that we got in America. You had the wrestlers who clearly
divided into protagonists and antagonists. You had the nationalistic themes: every racial or
national prejudice was represented, from the Sheik (during the oil embargo) who really kicked
some ass before, you know, getting his ass kicked by Fireman Bob Armstrong or whoever the
upstanding American was who finally did it to him, to Taru Tanaka, the “inscrutable oriental” (to
use Gordon Soley’s description) during the rise of the Japanese economy, to Abdullah the
Butcher (think Khadaffi), to name just a few. You had your tragic flaws, which in the case of the
Americans was always to play “too fairly” and get taken advantage of. And you even had your
Greek Chorus, in the form of Gordon Soley or the chanting audience.

It was theater.

Did anybody think it wasn’t? We always knew what would happen, how it would
happen, and even how long it would take to happen because nothing, NOTHING stands in the
way of commercial breaks. Not chauvinism, not jingoism, not nothinism. Because there’s no
such thing as a free lunch in the real world. After no more than fifteen minutes there was the
commercial break, and then we were on to another reely beeg shew. And after an hour
everybody went home revved up for the next contest.

I guess somebody bought tickets to the things. Does anybody wonder who is paying for
all the president’s great ideas? Or who is making money? Just who is this show’s sponsor? Who
is buying the tickets?

What brought all this on was my mom’s announcement last time I was down in Atlanta
that she was going to hear Abdullah the Butcher speak. I like to think he was going to address
the economy, and I’m pretty sure he planned to use “the language.”

I just wondered how he could. He was an adult, and I might add a very massive one,
thirty-five years ago. Is he still known as Abdullah the Butcher? Does he still wrestle? Or like
Robin Ventura who became governor of Minnesota, has he taken to politics? I plied the ancient
one with numerous questions.
 To each she replied, “let it be.”

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Instead, it rained that day. Four inches in one hour. Eight or ten
inches in a day, and many inches the preceding several days. Roads washed out, whole houses
floated away. I spent the day bailing out my brother’s basement. To some no doubt it seemed the
hand of Almighty God himself reached down, and the voice of Abdullah was silenced. We’ll
never know what he planned to say.

That day, at least, Abdullah did not speak the language.