Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut by Rob Sheffield

P.E. department ploy to get me away from the wrestling room, and it worked, since the first time I played badminton was like the first time I tasted sushi or heard the Beatles or read Wordsworth. This was a sport? This counted for gym requirements? “Pleased to meet you, badminton,” I told the shuttlecock. “Hope you guessed my name.” But at this point, the badminton team was just a gleam in Steel Neil’s increasingly exasperated eye.
    At that age, any physical activity vaguely resembling sexual contact is hilarious. But there’s nothing vague about wrestling. It begins with one dude on hands and knees, as the other one wraps an arm around to nestle against his chest (the “upside-down belt hold”) and another arm on his elbow. Then they roll around on the rubber mat. A wrestling match will often involve a friction boner or two. So a serious attitude is a must. Otherwise, you’ll just giggle and miss the more difficult pleasures available to the true wrestler. The varsity wrestling team, who used the practice room after we did, were very serious guys, and it was inspiring to watch them stretch for hours while we rehearsed our falls and clinches. There’s no denying that there was an element of showing off for these guys. The varsity team was undefeated, feared throughout the Independent School League. I hope it was inspirational to watch us warm up the mat for them, falling down in incredibly complicated ways.
    At practice, I always paired up with my buddy Flynn, who had a similarly Zen approach to the sport, derived from Kung Fu reruns on Channel 38. We were fascinated with the strategy of combat, the chesslike logical quandaries, the questions of leverage and balance. It was yogic, in a way, even if I was the kind of yogi whose lotus position was two shoulders to the mat. We loved the uniform and the ritual of lacing up the boots. As adolescent boys who loved martial arts mythology but were too lazy to actually learn any martial arts, wrestling suited our warrior-philosopher fantasies.
    Flynn and I were well matched physically and cerebrally, so the time we spent with our faces in proximity facilitated our philosophical discussions.
    “You know what would suck?” he mused one day as we grappled on the leather mat, standing face to face for the clinch.
    “What would suck?”
    “In 1984, if Winston Smith was afraid of squirrels instead of rats.”
    We were reading George Orwell in English class, and since we were the Class of ’84, we identified heavily with its dystopian vision.
    “Why would that suck?”
    “That would render him laughable. It wouldn’t be horrible when they show him rats in Room 101. It would just be funny.”
    “True,” I conceded, scoring reversal points on the half nelson. “That would suck.”
    “The torture guys would probably just laugh.”
    “Even the squirrels would laugh. Winston’s resistance to evil would have meant nothing.”
    “It would doubleplus suck.”
    We dropped to our knees to execute the Olympic lift.
    “This is all true,” I said. “Yet I cannot help but feel that what would really suck would be living in that futuristic totalitarian society. In fact, I think it’s a little strange, and maybe disturbing, you come away from the novel thinking that’s what would suck.”
    “Or rabbits.”
    “What about hamsters?”
    “That would suck too.”
    He slipped his arms into the forbidden full nelson. I nudged him away with my jaw.
    “What about cats?”
    “Not as much as rabbits.”
    “Bats. That would be awesome.”
    “Awesome.”
    “What do you call a masturbating cow?”
    “Beef stroganoff.”
    Splaaat! Pinned. Again.
    Wrestling team was my first experience riding in vans with groups of other boys who were all dressed alike. It was extremely exciting. Not surprising, since we were guys, we argued over music in the van, with the usual battle of rock versus disco. Doug Martilla had the boom box, and everyone had a different idea of what constituted