The school thought it had a legit math genius on its hands, a Good Will Hunting situation. They put Clint in some advanced classes, but then he sort of leveled off in terms of proficiency, and it was deduced, finally, that his facility for reciting baseball stats had created a misimpression.
Still, Clint had a sharp mind. As he evolved from the Hee-Hee Man into my walking, talking roomie, I began to appreciate him as a person. He was funny and irreverent in a way that I wasn’t. As we lay in our beds, we both cracked up at his droll little observations about Dad’s efforts to cover up his thinning hair, the comb-overs and the foggy applications of hold-it-in-place hair spray that drove Mom crazy. （Of course, karma would get back at us in a big way. Early in my Happy Days era, I noted the amount of red hair that was damming up the drain when I showered. I then contemplated the hairlines of every male I had met on both sides of our family and humbly accepted my fate right then and there.）
Clint was also highly coordinated for his age, good enough to play reasonably competitive games of Nerf basketball and Wiffle Ball when we were still little. We also wrestled, as brothers do. Or “rassled,” because that’s how Dad said it, in his otherwise faint Oklahoma accent.
One of our bonding rituals was watching pro-wrestling matches on Channel 5, a local station. We couldn’t get enough of it: the flamboyant heels Freddie Blassie and Gorilla Monsoon, the pretty boys Buddy Rogers and John Tolos, the abnormally huge Haystacks Calhoun. Like lots of kids, Clint and I couldn’t quite suss out if the violence was real. It looked real, but something about it felt a bit . . . theatrical.
Whatever it was, we loved it. Clint and I imitated the pro wrestlers, tackling each other to the floor. Sometimes, when I was pissed off at him for knocking down a Lincoln Log house I’d made or telling on me like a whiny little bastard, our fights turned real. I had a major physical advantage, being five years older, and I would pin Clint to the floor, my face flushed with anger and vengeance. He would scream, “Mommmmmm!”
It was always Dad who ran in and separated us. He had a stock speech that he gave us whenever this happened: “One of these days, you boys are going to be grown men living in different places, and you’re going to wish that you were friends. I hope you really cherish what you’ve got. Because you are brothers, but you have a chance to also be lifelong friends. And that starts now.”
It was a good cooldown speech, but I realize that it was also rooted in a kind of regret. He and his brother Max had an eleven-year age difference and were not close. He didn’t want history to repeat itself.
CLINT
The truth is, Dad loved wrestling as much as we did. He initiated the action by declaring, “C’mon, boys, let’s do some rassling!” We’d move the furniture to prepare the ring, though this didn’t always assure us safety. Doesn’t every boy remember cracking his head on the sofa?
Then Dad would drop to his knees and do his best version of a ring announcer and introduce us as wrestlers, just like the guy did on Channel 5. He really turned it on for these matches, putting to use his skills as a former children’s thespian. “Ding, ding, ding!” he’d announce. “And now . . . the main event!” I would grab a hold of his legs and he would humor me by falling to the floor. One of the reasons I made fun of Dad’s hair loss was that his newly exposed forehead scrunched into these big lateral wrinkles when he was on the floor, and the sight of his head upside down was hilarious to me, a reconfigured face: the wrinkles looked like a mouth and his eyebrows were like a weird mustache and . . . well, you know, it’s the kind of thing a kid gets obsessed with.
Dad always let us win. He played the defeated guy really well, groaning, “Aaagh, ohhh, ya got me again.” And then he switched to the announcer doing the count and raising the victor’s arm.
As Ron and I got deeper into pro wrestling, I took a liking to the greatest heel of them all, the Sheik. To simulate the head wrap that he wore, I pulled a pair of my own tighty-whities over my head, the elastic at my temples. God, I hope they were clean.