Page 38 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

I laughed. “Thank you,” I whispered.

He looked at me and nodded, his eyes dark with love.

“What is the book you’re reading about?” I asked, gesturing at the book he had tucked in his armpit.

“Gladiators,” Jinx said, flashing the cover.

“You’re really into ancient Rome,” I observed.

“What gave it away?” my dad asked, winking. Of the books that lined his room, Rome was in about half the titles.

“Why? I mean, what interests you about it?”

“Oh, the violence, I suppose.” He gave a cute little shrug then winced, tried to resettle his shoulders.

“Because of wrestling?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Do you feel, like— Do you feel conflicted about the violence?” I asked.

My dad squinted then said, in that soft-loud ASMR voice of his, “I’ve spent so many years being defensive that it’s hard to tell. You know, recounting to myself how violent football is, or hockey, and don’t even get me started on MMA. I always wanted to defend wrestling; in a way it’s the most ethical one. Because we’re trying to put on a show, not truly harm each other. It’s a bunch of boys from the middle of nowhere, you know, kind of screaming, ‘Look at me! Love me! Look at the insane and beautiful things I can do with my body! I can make you gasp, I can make you scream, I can make you cry!’”

“That’s beautiful,” I said, “to think about it like that.”

Even though he was looking better, his skin was still so waxy and pale in the bright light, his eyes sunken. I had never been so aware of my father’s mortality. It was palpable, my sense that someday he would die. I’d also never been able to so fully imagine him as the wild milk-white bull my mother first fell for, the young man from Middle-of-Nowhere, Canada, screaming, “Look at me! Love me!”

“Oh yeah,” my dad said. “That’s the heart of it. Boys on trampolines fooling around with their friends. That is the beautiful seed wherefrom the wrestling flower sprouts. But you know, almost all my friends are dead. Not all. But more than half. And sometimes they died in horrific and gruesome ways. So the cost, the cost of it, is not beyond me. You know, when you said you would never let Bodhi become a wrestler, I thought, What is wrong with me that I would? I don’t want that for him. Why was I saying he could take it? He’s four months old! Even before Bodhi, though, I mean, for years and years, I’ve been thinking about this, about violence and how much we love it and how we can’t stop. And just as all roads lead to Rome, all histories of blood sport lead there as well.”

“We’ve always been this way,” I said.

“On the contrary, I think we used to be much worse.”

“Really?” My knowledge of Roman gladiatorial contests pretty much started and ended with that Russell Crowe movie.

“The kinds of contests they held would really challenge a modern sensibility. I mean, involving animals, making women fight dwarfs, plays where when someone is killed in the story, they really kill them onstage. Slavery made all this possible, as a mental category, of course.”

I had not thought at all about slavery outside of the context of America.

“They would make these long seesaws, like teeter-totters. And then they’d chain criminals up at either end, and let in, you know, a dozen starving lions and bears, and watch as the men all pushed off with their legs, trying to be the one in the air, even though they knew that when their counterpart was done, you know, being eaten, that weight would be removed and they’d come crashing down and be eaten as well.” His dark eyes were dreamy, focused somewhere on the ceiling.

“That is horrifying,” I said.

“You know, and little kids would see that. People would watch and laugh and yell and boo, just like a wrestling show. And you have to think about how profoundly different it must have been in their heads. Now we’d think watching someone be murdered is profoundly traumatizing, except it wasn’t traumatic for them. It was fun. And trying to imagine how that worked, what beliefs had to be in place, is just fascinating to me.”

“Why do you think it changed?” I asked. “Like, civilization?”

“I don’t know what a historian would say, but I would say Jesus: love thy neighbor, and it’s easier for a camel to fit through a needle’s eye than a rich man to get into heaven. In a place like Rome, insisting everyone had intrinsic value—it rattled them. I mean, they killed him for it.”

I was not expecting an answer like that from my dad, who was, as far as I knew, violently atheist.

A doctor came in through the curtain right then, interrupting our conversation. I sat quietly as he asked Jinx questions about his back and various surgeries. Even without Jinx saying anything about substance abuse, the questions about pain management and medication were pointed and repetitive. The doctor asked what pain medication Jinx was on multiple times, as though he didn’t believe Jinx when he told him none. He explained they would order X-rays and an MRI to make sure there was no compromise to the spinal fusion.

I was growing agitated. It was the way the doctor talked to my dad, the image of those metal parts implanted in his spine. Across from us there was a girl who’d slipped in a hot tub and was bleeding profusely from a cut along her hairline, waiting to be seen by a doctor, holding a paper towel to her forehead. Sometimes wrestlers would sneak a razor blade into a match and cut themselves at their hairline so that they’d bleed; they called it “adding color” to a match. Abdullah the Butcher’s head was practically grooved from all the scars.

Mick Foley and Terry Funk, the tacks and the razor wire and the broken glass, or Nick Gage, oh God, Nick Gage. Rubbing that pizza cutter in men’s mouths until the blood flowed down their chins and necks, mixing with the sweat. The time he got stabbed in the stomach with a broken fluorescent light tube and had to be helicoptered out. I kept thinking about the men who wrote to tell me to kill myself.

“You should head home,” Jinx said. “I’ll be fine here.”

---