SHORT STORIES: Cauliflower

Cauliflower. The deformation of a wrestler’s ear. A grappler’s rite of passage.

When I first wrestled (just after I could walk) my dad purchased a blue headgear for my brother and me. BRUTE was written on the side. “Brute” soon became a name brand, written on kneepads and singlets, that I was all too familiar with, mixed with odors of egg yolk sweat and musty mats that seemed to have been used since the Stone Age.

In high school, I was introduced to a kind of starvation that most people during those hormonal teen years didn’t know about. It was all to make a certain weight class. The scale held power in my eyes. The scale became a drug as my teammates and I, one by one, lined up and weighed in nothing but underwear or boxers. Some weren’t as lucky as they had to strip down to nothing. They blamed the quarter of a pound that betrayed them on the extra handful of fries they had snagged from other, more carefree friends (like football players).

Sometimes, in shaking hands with my opponent before the first period, I’d smell Frosted Flakes or Cinnamon Toast Crunch on his breath; I couldn’t tell which. That meant that he must’ve had milk with it which could upset his stomach while wrestling which could mean that I had the advantage because I ate something more solid – like a honeybun. We both had only recently gained strength from gorging on bad food, a by-product of cutting weight so severely. We’d only recently started to think of the match and the mat and the crowd instead of the food fuel. And I remember the rest like it was yesterday…

The whistle blows. Its arrows pierce my drums in one echoing blast of lunacy and instinct kicks in. My trained body doesn’t run on coals, but on king-size Snickers and blue Gatorade after weigh-ins in locker rooms where normal people couldn’t fathom eating. Rusty, tetanus breeding grounds of lockers and month old jockstraps and socks stuffed in them since summer, and cold ceramic tiles that my teammate evacuated oatmeal on just a week prior. A season of no emotion. The only emotion shown is when my blood sugar feels just fine or when the team’s won a match. Feeling resurfaces when everything feels good. Forget a girlfriend, forget love, and forget any kind of sentimentality when I’m starving – it’s just not happening.

My opponent takes me down.

A quick shutter click of a millisecond and my eyes close for what seems like a week. Visions of grueling practices in sweatpants throw themselves into the forefront of my mind. There had been times when I stuck my fingers down my throat, too. Times when the laxatives weren’t strong enough. Times when the trash bags that I wore as I wrestled against my state champion teammates weren’t hot enough. There were cold mornings outside of strange schools where my teammates and I had trained our bodies into something resembling rebar and stood huddled together like hobbits in the Black Land of Mordor with nothing else to prove. Nothing but self-realization.

I remember one night after practice, during my senior year, when our team’s manager hugged me from behind as I sat outside on a curb. She surprised me. It was a friendly hug, but it lasted just long enough to calm my Hulk-like state of being. She was dry, I was cold and drenched in sweat. She was a senior, just like me, trying to relish small moments of kindness, during those last days of high school. Some kind of heart flutter had interrupted my thoughts, blocking my state championship vision for a moment. Where was this tenderness before? Why hadn’t I known that this sense of peace existed?

Later, she sat with me on the bus ride home from a tournament at a school far away. All I felt was warmth and happiness and laughter. Things that I wished I could have. Things that I couldn’t emote; my mind wouldn’t allow it. Her boyfriend, who was a wrestler on the team, told me to not “drink his juice” as she sat beside me on that bumpy ride and he went to clown around with the others in the back of the bus. I felt jealousy for a moment. Jealousy that I lacked the words to make someone mine, like he had. Then I had to mentally kick myself. I wasn’t there for that. I had transferred to that school to win. I was there to show ‘em all.

Over the years, the white lettering of BRUTE faded and smeared away. And although I felt like Owen Wilson in Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited,” I was lucky that my ear didn’t do the same. When my dad first got us those headgears, he explained the significance of such an embarrassing contraption

“You don’t want your ears turning out like those Iranians,” he said with a grin, taking satisfaction in yet another story that left me with a look of bewilderment.

“Why? What’s wrong with the Iranians?” I asked.

“They’ve got holes in their heads where their ears ought to be,” was the response.

Not only was I freaked out about wrestling with no headgear and getting a sizable hole in my own head, I couldn’t imagine the horror of actually wrestling someone who deserved to be on display at a local freak show because of negligence.

During those years of wrestling at practice without a headgear or finishing up matches after having tossed my headgear to the side in frustration, I developed the dreaded cauliflower ear. My left one. The tissue had hardened almost immediately. It was never soft. I never had to drain it. I just woke up and there it was. Like a tooth fairy’s selfish thoughtfulness, the sport of wrestling left me with its own gift; a gift that I initially wore proudly.

Yes, the hardened cartilage was a small badge of honor that I wore with pride in the bustling hallways of school as I walked past girls in my middle school. While at a summer wrestling camp, our coach told me something about cauliflower ears. “Girls like to nibble on ‘em,” he said with a wink.

I liked that idea. I quickly imagined sitting in a red Ferrari on a Saturday night with a girl nibbling on my swollen ear. What were my lips doing in that imaginary scenario? Smiling.

It never happened, of course. Who in their right mind would want to nibble on deformed flesh? I never met anyone who was a lover of the macabre, nor did I want to. It was just too weird. So that little dream of being admired for having a mangled ear quickly faded.

Later on, my brother, Cody, had a run in with this wrestling tooth fairy whose overabundance seemed constant. He actually had to have his ear drained. I tried not to think about it as it turned my stomach when I heard that “the liquid that came out of my ear was nothin’ but pus and blood.”

Cody’s friend who wrestled with us was short of some brain cells. After my brother told him to drain his swollen ear, puffy like a tick, the kid came to school the next day telling him of his experience. “I couldn’t get it to drain,” he told Cody.

“Why? What did you do?”

“I got a needle and kept poking it. Just poking it all over.”

The guy’s ear was covered in red puncture marks. Nothing drained.

Years later, I reflect on an experience that had taken up the better part of twenty years of my life. Wrestling taught me how to go up against something bigger than myself. And come out the other side alive, whether or not I won. Because I didn’t always win. No one does. It taught me to step out on the mat and collide with and attack someone that had worked just as hard as I did, and in some cases harder. Wrestling was my great awakening. From having my neck twisted and nearly voluntarily breaking it just to not get pinned, to reaching back on my opponent (the forbidden move in wrestling that all the coaches say will get you stuck on your back) and pinning my opponent, I was a regular Houdini, twisting and contorting my way to victory. You couldn’t hold me down. And if you did, you were as strong as a damn ox.

Wrestling taught me that others, like my teammates, could be just as tough, too. And when I meet a wrestler in spontaneous conversation in a shopping mall, restaurant, gas station, or even movie theater, there is a genuine camaraderie there that no other sport has. We don’t size each other up, no. That’s what football players do. Instead, while talking to one another, two strangers, we understand, without mentioning, what the other has gone through in training. What the other is capable of. Of the sleeping giant on the inside that was trained to win. Of the heart that it takes to give it your all out there on the mat. Of the vision to see things through to the very end. Everyone that’s wrestled was on some sort of vision quest.

Nowadays, the cauliflower ear is so present in media. Randy Couture makes a reference to it in “The Expendables.” Everyone sees the ears on their HD screens during the UFC fights. They’re all over the place.

To this day, my left ear is still a little cauliflowered. It’s almost like it’s stuck in time. Do I want to have a cauliflower ear? No. Not anymore. But then again, it’s not as bad as some that I’ve seen. The ear is something physical. And who you are is not based on how tough you look. In one of Ace Atkins’ Quinn Colson novels, the author once alluded to the fact that ugly don’t make tough. And there’s a satisfaction in knowing who you are without wearing it on your sleeve…or ear.