I LOVE DX

Growing up, I fucking loved wrestling. I sit here in June 2020 and try to remember the first time I saw wrestling on TV and I don’t remember it. I think it originated with hearing my cousin and my dad talk about wrestling from when they watched it. For the record, as I sit here writing this, it’s June 2020 and I’m 33 years old since March 13. Yeah Im a pisces if it matters.

My best friend Britni Higgenbotham and I got really into wrestling when I was 9, 10 years old? Who the fuck knows? I honestly have a terrible memory as far as a sense of time and age goes. I just know that I would have probably gotten into a fist fight over WWF at that point but we were too busy swimming in her pool and driving the riding lawnmower around the yard in between to worry about that shit and besides, all our friends liked it for the most part. Her brother and his friends would give us shit for not liking WCW too and we’d just all make fun of each other and hurl insults like a bunch of old war vets playing fucking poker at an american legion or some shit. We had a lot of fun.

I had AOL 3.0 and my first screen name was I LOVE DX

it was all cool until as a 12 year old i ventured outside of wrestling chat rooms.

“hahaha you love dicks!”

I didnt even realize DX would be translated to DICKS!

I eventually got another screen name…..

Once I got older, like a teenager i dont know im bad at math, my best friends older brother also gave us shit about wrestling, but he was kind of a juggalo and so we were just like, whatever dude, fuck off. he did a backyard wrestling thing but they were also rednecks. juggalo rednecks are a thing. he was such an asshole. I subscribed to their once a week AOL emails where they’d send out updates and looking back i was like, lord why did i do this to look cool for an older idiot. i think we were way cooler. sorry Zeke.

Things like this made me glad i am an only child to be quite honest.

I was an only child with too much time on my hands and anything I got into, i was obsessed. Anime, witchcraft, music. Thats all that comes to mind at the moment but being fairly ADD/ADHD, if i really liked something i would just get god damn invested emotionally. Probably to distract myself from my dysfunctional home life. In school I excelled in literally every subject except math. I’m talking A’s in every subject except for fucking math and then my brain just could not focus. It wasn’t for lack of interest or trying but more like some fucked up chemical situation where my brain has always felt like it just goes dark when too many numbers come up. Eventually i got put on aderral which is a whole other story, but hey! I could do math and get a C-! Thanks modern medicine!

anyway, i liked school. i loved learning. i grew up around a bunch of mostly ignorant ass people who, in their defense (I guess?) had been generationally traumatized by poverty and abuse and didn’t have the means or the emotional energy to rise above it. So, being forced into this environment, (and i mean forced. i had no where else to go) i frequently learned what NOT to do via my parents and family. But once i was acutely aware of having a conscious and a semi moral compass, i began to soak up random knowledge like a fucking sponge. I wanted to get out of this cycle, and fast.

Ecology club? I became president. Broadcast journalism? i was editing news segments and filming. Theatre? Oh! That was MY SHIT and it was where I felt like I could actually let my freak flag fly. Soccer? I played every year from middle school to high school and i loved the competition, probably too much. I quit in my junior year to pursue “the arts”. German club? I was VP. I did 4 years and can barely recite Die Lorelei but, I can do a mean Der Bratapfel! Whatever, that shit was fun. I got to wear a fishnet shirt and mosh with 8 people in the BEDFORD VA HIGHSCHOOL GYMNASIUM DURING GERMAN CONVENTION to Rammstein and 99 red baloons. Life was good. I have the pictures to prove it. Im sorry.

Film Club? VP. The list goes on and on and lets be real, as much as I loved all these experiences, the point remains: I never wanted to go home. These stupid titles mean nothing in highschool, but it looked cool on a resume for my first job at joann fabrics because i guess it showed my chain smoking manager that i was qualified enough to have elderly women SCREAM at me for cutting their fucking fabric wrong. whatever, theyre dead now so fuck them. at least they left some good quilts i guess. also most of these crotchety old women would definitely steal a bunch of shit and honestly that was pretty inspiring, at least to know that eventually i’d be such a relic of time that minimum wage workers would look the other way and let me steal a hot glue gun or some shit. We are only afforded a small amount of triumphs in this life and so I’ll take it!

Home has always been a very weird term for me. As a child the word “home” revolved less around words like “safety. comfort. security” and more like, “Well, i guess i have to fucking live here and it’s better than section 8 housing or attempting to run away so fuck it, here I am. Ignore what I can, fight against what I can and GET OUT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.”

So I guess with all that being said, I was always looking for an escape. I never drank or fucked with any drugs until i was around 19. So thats not what i mean by “escape”. There are many other stories to come that stem from substance abuse and promiscuity so just stay tuned if you want that juicy content.

I wanted escape in the form of day dreaming. Dreaming. Artistic shit like writing fanfiction about Dragonball Z. Drawing anime characters crying blood and faeries. I know. Shut up. They are funny and embarassing, bless my fucking teenage angsty heart.

I have wanted to be a performer in some fashion since i could talk. Even as a fucking kid I was just running around making a scene, singing nonsense and basically screaming SOMEBODY LOVE AND PAY ATTENTION TO ME JESUS CHRIST internally and finally that shit just busted right on out. Like that part of Paradise Lost. Right? Where the other thing burst out of the womb or stomach of something? right. i need to look that part up, its metal as fuck.

I remember one of the first silent films I ever saw pieces of and it was The Torrent. I was enthralled. I was like, damn, how are these people conveying all this emotion at the same time not saying anything and keeping their god damn mouth shut? it was something I could learn from. I’ve always been quite mouthy, growing up like i did you definitely had to be. I came up listening to the my mom and her sisters recounting bar fight stories. One in particular was told to me by my aunt Terry on the way to the courthouse to get a protective order against her nephew, my cousin Donnie. She told me her and her girl friend were at a bar one night and both wanted to whip this chicks ass so they flipped a coin to see who got to do it. Thats just too funny in the context of the entire situation…All the women in my family grew up fighting. I have somehow narrowly escaped coming to blows for the most part minus the handful of dudes i’ve put my hands on, mostly at bars, for fucking with me or my friends. Those people were trash and they don’t count as far as im concerned. Sometimes you just gotta take the trash out.

I remember watching bits of an old B&W movie where the people are under water for quite some time, its silent obviously except for the score. I said to my cousin, “How come they aint talking?!” My cousin laughs and is like, “Um. Theyre under water…?” I shut the hell up and went somewhere. I think i was like 8. Who the fuck knows. Anyway.

This whole rambling ass nonsense goes to say that wrestling was an easy thing for me to fall in love with. I was a dramatic bitch at heart and so were all these (mostly) dudes in tight ass pants and short shorts. We had something in common at least. I loved the theatre of it, the stories, the characters, the plot twists, the revenge, the betrayals. If you have never watched wrestling from back in the day at least a few times, I honestly kind of feel for you, cause that shit was raw. HAH. No pun intended….Of course its fake! It was written and produced and most characters were developed by writers. The hits those people took? The real hits were real. that was real blood. I unfortunately never watched much ECW, the most bloody and gorey sect of wrestling at that time, but damn if i didnt turn my TV onto the pay per view channel when it was on and try to make out shapes from between the scrambled static like a 10 year old trying to look at porn and catch a glimpse of a titty.

wrestling might have been the first thing to show me that to be an artist and a performer is literal fucking artistic, physical and existential pain, something I would come to experience and embody by 2006. This was late 90s and I had no idea of my future. No shit, I mightve been a withcraft nerd but i wasn’t psychic.

speaking of all this growing up white trash and shit, i always wanted to go see wrestling live. SO BAD. as a kid i would've probably given my pinky finger to see some of these assholes up close. the only place they came in relation to where I lived, Matoaca, Virginia, was Richmond. capitol city. richmond coliseum.

My dad, bless his heart. My dad was the king of starting things with me and not finishing them, making plans and promises he couldn’t keep or forgot to keep because he had one too many beers. I lived with my grandma (and my mom and her sister and occasionally her other sister and my two cousins and….yeah you get the point) out in the kind-of country and I wanted a tree house so god damn bad i could taste it. It was like my tomboy pre knowing i was queer coming out before I realized it.

My dad being the grizzled working class, fix everything all the time, no skill he didnt have kinda dude. He was like yeah, fuck it! we dont need any wood im gonna cut down and utilize three of these skinny pine trees to build a triangle shaped frame. That was it, the frame sat there screwed in for about 6? months. then i went out back into the woods and eventually one of the sides of the pine framed triangle had fallen down and i was like well shit, there goes my wet dream of a fucking tree house…guess i’ll go put my tent up in the backyard.

Sorry I keep doing this. psyche. no im not!

Okay so thats a little insight to my dad when I was a kid. Finally WWF was scheduled to come to the richmond coliseum. Finally I had the chance to see my heroes in person. from far away. who cared. it was the heartbreak kid! I had a fucking cardboard standup of this dude that i begged my grandma to buy me from MJDesigns in Colonial heights. i was fucking pumped and nothing could stop me. I made several signs from Dollar general poster board and sharpies:

DX RULES — SUCK IT!

YOU SUCK

3:16

who the hell knows what else I wrote, i was like 10. maybe i was 3. maybe i was 29. i dont know im drunk.

My dad assured me he would get tickets in advance and we’d have decent seats because this was important to me. I mean, not exactly in those terms verbatim but you catch my drift.

We show up and my dad buys two tickets at the gate. we are in the nosebleed section, rows of empty seats. room for me to spread out and get pumped?!

I’m still stoked because ive never even been inside of a fucking building this big before that wasn’t a jail to visit a family member! My dad is pounding light beer and cheering! AND I HAD POSTERS! THE WHOLE ARENA AND TV AUDIENCE WOULD SEE MY SELF EXPRESSION VIA 67 CENT POSTERBOARD AND SHARPIE!

except one minor detail i hadn’t considered: this wrestling match wasn’t televised.

It took me a few rounds. I was probably screaming the entire time and finally I saw another lone sign holder across the smoky coliseum.

we.were.the.only.ones.holding.up SIGNS

my heart sank. i felt embarassed. and also some form of solidarity for the other idiot, although i didn’t know what that word meant yet. I also felt pissed at my dad because we were standing up in the nose bleed section because he didn’t do the adult thing where you plan and by tickets in advance. and he didn’t have the worldly experience to tell me not to bring fucking posters to an untelesvised wrestling event. wasn’t he embarrassed? wouldnt he run into some other dad at the Richmond Coliseum Bar after 46 light beers and have to evade questions of, “Was that your kid with the posters? Yall know this aint televised, right?”

Being the ADHD golden child that I was, I got over it fairly quickly as soon as HBK rocked his hot little ass out into the ring. Everything else from this experience might be a little foggy, but i remember the moment i saw Shawn Michaels from that nosebleed section like it was a religious experience. I screamed. I screamed so hard I instantly got a headache that lasted until the next day. i guess you could call it more of a shriek.