An Historic Find

Back in the late 1960s, a traveling salesman came to our house and sold my parents a set of Compton's Encyclopedia. This was great for my schooling, of course, and those books played some small role in making me what I am today.

But I'm not thinking only about what I am today as a writer and a knowledgable human being. I'm also thinking about why I'm here, writing on this blog and imagining wrestling. Wrestling shows for a young man from a rural area in the 1970s came on only Saturday morning and Saturday night. Once wrestling became elevated to the status of an obsession, my hungry eyes and imagination were fed the other six days of the week through print: sometimes in the pages of wrestling magazines at the drugstore or anytime I could get a moment alone via the brief entry on wrestling in the last volume of the Compton's set ("WXYZ").

That wrestling entry featured a full page of black-and-white photos that pretended to portray the progress of a match between two young wrestlers (165-pound class), nine pictures from their ready position to the pin. Who knows how many times these pictures aroused me over those years when I was still at home? Who knows how many times I masturbated to the one wrestler's head-scissors-and-arm hold on his opponent? How many times until I destroyed them? Although I don't remember the exact event, I know that at some point, my heterosexual Christian guilt hit me so hard that between one moment of satisfaction and release and the next time I felt the need, I ripped the offending page out and threw it away or burned it . . . something.

But then, my cousin had the same Compton set (with different covers) and the same pictures in volume "WXYZ." So, I didn't lose all access to that B&W dream match completely, but such access became limited. Few were the opportunities afterwards to sit with those pictures and revel in the way they excited me.

And then, eventually, they were gone forever.

Well, maybe not forever. Given the amount of stuff that's out there on the internet, I eventually began looking around to learn if somebody similarly affected had uploaded that one beautiful page. But, believe it or not, I've never found it out in cyberspace. Not in the B&W flesh at least. Once I found simple line drawings of more or less the same images, but those didn't satisfy and, instead, made me remember the old pictures with an even greater sense of loss.

Then yesterday I was in my office and received a call from a retired colleague (call him J). He asked if I still ran the fundraising book sale that annually supports a local organization. The mother of this colleague had died fifteen years before, and he was just getting around to clearing out and selling her house -- a house that contained a lot of books collected by his father, mother, and himself. I told him that a younger colleague of mine (call him S) now managed the book sale. When I got hold of S, he said we ought to kill an hour and make a run to see what was available from the estate's shelves.

To cut this short, I remember standing above a box of various books, looking down at them while J, S, and I talked. Suddenly my eyes focused on a set of dark-bound books -- Compton's Encyclopedia. My breath caught, and I immediately bent down out of the conversation and grabbed "WXYZ." I got hold of my excitement and pretended to flip through casually past "World War I" and "World War II" and then to "Wrestling," expecting to see those line drawings. But there, beneath my eyes again after at least forty years, two lithe young men wrestled through nine B&W pictures. My response to seeing these was immediate and visceral.

I was breathless trying to figure out what to do, as I was sure that S wouldn't want this old -- but not antique -- set for the book sale. So, after holding the book for an inordinately long while, I put it back in the box and bided my time. Then, when J took S into the house to show him something, I quickly retrieved the book and used my phone to take pictures of those beloved pictures. I realized later that J and S might have seen me through the windows, but I was beyond caring. (I wouldn't mind having S ask me what I was doing, as I'd like to open up a wrestling conversation with him and then grapple with him in some grassy clearing off a mountain trail. But that specific image is a tale for another day.)


I suppose that as I grew to well over two hundred pounds, I lost interest in the 165-pound class, but I was still thrilled to see those fellows from long ago -- called Black and White, according to the color of their trunks. And I was particularly thrilled to see Black work White into that head-scissors-and-arm hold again.