A couple of days ago I traveled to the house of a friend who lives less than two hours away. This was, I believe, our fourth wrestling meeting in the last year. But we hadn't wrestled since back in January, when he moved to a new place--out of the old apartment where we had a couple of good wrestling bouts and into a house located on some acreage. Our plan was to find a concealed spot not far from the house and wrestle outdoors. I haven't wrestled completely outdoors since I was a kid, so something about this prospect was really exciting.



Part of this excitement dates back to my days in elementary school. Remember National Geographic, the good boy's Playboy? My school library carried NG, and I looked at it often. But really, my reasons had little to do with the easy availability of beautiful photographs that sometimes included the bare breasts of women living in remote Third-World villages. I saw those pictures, sure, but for a boy with a mind like mine, the places the magazine could take me--be bare breasts there or not--drew me to its place on the shelf time and time again.



Even then, wrestling was a particular fascination, already eroticized in my prepubescent brain and body. Thus, one issue that drew me to itself again and again featured a story on Alexander the Great. Most of the photography connected to the article focused on landscapes through which Alexander moved to create his empire, but a couple of photographs were sort of reenactments of the man's life. One photo in particular showed Alexander wrestling with another man in lush green grass. Both men's bodies were taut and their sun-bronzed skin shiny with sweat, and, as I remember, both wore black briefs intended, I suppose, to suggest loincloths (although most like the real Alexander and his opponent would have wrestled naked).



This image is framed and hanging in a back gallery of my mind to this day.



Now, be assured that, while we wrestled in black briefs, my friend and I own no taut bodies, and the only portions of our skin that could be considered sun-bronzed are our arms and heads. We found a spot in tall clover and weeds, not lush green grass, and spread out three fairly small pieces of cloth for a mat. (Alexander and his man wrestled on no mat.) But we wrestled outdoors, two heavy white bodies against the blue and brown of the mat cloths and the not-so-brilliant green of the clover and weeds, beneath the mid-morning sun, an outbuilding a few feet away on one side, a thickly wooded hillside rising a few feet away on the other, our cast-off clothes hanging in a group of nearby saplings.



Not the perfect recreation of that old NG photo but a great experience--except for the fact that my skin is sensative to the grass, and that evening I noticed that my back was a swirl of red welts that were a reaction to a wonderful morning of splendid wrestling in the grass!

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As I finished this entry, I decided to query the amazing Google for an image of "Alexander" "wrestling." Lo and behold, the old NG photo showed up on the 6th page of results from the image search. It was also used as part of a blog, and here is what the writer wrote about it: "The final photo is from an article from 1968, 'In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great'. A Turkish oil wrestling contest takes place amid the ruins of Ephesus. Here, back in the Western end of Eurasia, Turks act out the roles of ancient Greeks and Macedonians in the imagination of the reporter. "

Time clouds the memory. I'm trying to reach back and pick up this blog's early thread about the matches I've had over the past 12+ years. I know which match I wrote about last, but now I'm having difficulty coming up with who and what came next. That match with K in Ohio took place, I believe, in March 1997. I wrestled him again in the summer, although I'm having trouble remembering if it was summer of 1997 or 1998. Rather than let this freeze me up, I'm going to say that it was only a few months between the two matches with K.

I wrestled K again at a different motel near Kent, OH, in the summer of 1997. This time Dr. J, the AOL friend who introduced me to K, was in town, so I got together with him too. I met one on the first day of my stay and one on the second. Seems as if we were trying to get all three of us together for a third day of wrestling, but that didn't work out.

After I'd met him in real life, I always felt bad about Dr. J. Not that our online friendship didn't translate to the real world. That wasn't it. We got along just fine, I think. But I have my particulars about the kind of man I like to wrestle, which to some extent makes my matches too much about me. Dr. J was a really fine wrestler with a head scissors that felt as if it could pop the top of my head off. But just as K, a big and burly bear, was just the kind of wrestler I like to get my hands on, Dr. J weighed only 175 or so--the lightest man I've ever wrestled. While K had the kind of body you could easily roll around on the mat with, Dr. J was all hard muscles and sharp points. If I were deeply into wrestling in and of itself, I should've enjoyed this. But with Dr. J the erotic component was missing. I tried not to hurt his feelings, but I'm afraid I did. For that I'm sorry.

My second match with K went much like the first one, except that he didn't have a headcold this time. From time to time I got him in a good hold, but it wasn't good enough. As much as he enjoyed the punishment of a head scissors or an arm stretch, he always escaped and in a little while, I'd be submitting to some head scissors variation he'd worked me into.

The clearest memory of this encounter with K is a bit of conversation we had either before or after the match. We were talking about wrestling and sexuality, and he made the comment that it was through wrestling that he learned--or recognized--that he was gay. He told me a little story about the last--perhaps one of the last--girlfriends he had. He was going through the motions with her without realizing it. But she had a couple of brothers. And apparently during his visits to his girlfriend he became friends with her brothers. This friendship led to some friendly wrestling matches in the back yard at her house. K told me that these matches with her brothers really got him hot and bothered in more ways than one, and the contrast between those feelings and those he felt for their sister was a stark one. He loved the wrestling and the feeling of wrestling, and in this he realized that his passions and emotions were clearly more invested in the homoerotic and homosexual than in the opposite of these, the hetero versions.

This time we met, K was in a relationship, and when we wrestled, he didn't wear the no-fly briefs of our first encounter but a pair of shorts. I was disappointed in that look but not in the wrestling.

K is a man I'd like to wrestle again someday. Dr. J is a man I'd like to be friends with some day. Doesn't that sound like the selections some of us make for our lovers. One man is thrilled with the friendship of this one "other," perhaps even more so than with the friendship of this other "other." But the physical relationship with the other "other" is more to his liking and so he commits to the structure of that desire and lives with the loss of the better friend.