They were sorta like this guy only rougher.
(photo by @adbullahx on Unsplash)
When I was 13, I was the singer in a band. We didn’t play out anywhere, just practiced and jammed and had fun. That is until our classmate Mona and her brother Eddie asked us if we wanted to play a pool party for their parents. The big time! We were excited. We said yes.
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Mona and Eddie’s dad was a famous Big-Time Wrestler. He was a scary looking fireplug of a guy with a voice like a badly scratched record. Both Mona and Eddie wore a lot of what we’d now call bling and what my Mom called bad taste. Mona and Eddie had “been around.”
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Our parents let us play that party. I often look back on these events and marvel at the naiveté of all parents.
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When we set up, it was obvious this was going to be a different kind of adult party. Male guests were muscle bound, broken nosed, scarred, huge, gruff, loud, and boisterous wrestlers. Female guests sported bouffants, seriously misguided micromini dresses and tons of blue eyeshadow. They laughed and squealed a lot.
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I saw more headlocks and goosing that evening than I ever thought possible. There was a ton of alcohol which they kept offering to us as the evening progressed. We declined.
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These guys wrestled each other, threw each other in the pool, destroyed a few pool chairs horsing around, felt up the giggling ladies, danced obscenely, drank like prohibition was going into effect the next day and wandered off into the bushes with women not their wives.
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Both men and women danced and drank and sang and cursed and wanted to play our guitars and drums and take over the vocal mic. They were super kind to us “kiddos.” They were just out to party hard and by god, party they did! They danced and sang to everything. They appeared to love us. We loved them.
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After our second set, Mona came up to me. “Things are gonna to get wild around here pretty soon (!) and you guys should be gone by then,” she said. “I’ll put on some loud music and you all can start sneaking out. They’ll never know,” she promised.
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The guitar player called his older brother to pick us up and we faded away while the crowd enjoyed grilled burgers. On the way out, we heard the guys arguing over past fights while the women laughed uproariously and called for more gin.
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Although I never watched Big-Time Wrestling, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this bunch of hard-working showmen and their ladies who took a chance on a junior high school band out on their first gig. We all had the time of our lives. And we got paid.
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