When you throw up and your mom’s not there

I think I was nine or ten years old at the time. A friend of mine offered to take me to a wrestling match at Maple Leaf Gardens. This wasn’t lame local wrestling, this was the bigs: the WWF. And it was back during what I like to think of as the Golden Age of wrestling—with the Iron Sheik, Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka, Kamala, Big John Studd, and all the rest.

Before Frankie and his family came to get me, my parents gave me a quick lecture on manners, and then handed me a ten dollar bill. Then I was off, packed in the car with Frankie, his parents, his uncle, and his cousin.

Can’t say I recall much about the drive up, or who was on the card that night, but here are the things that I do remember:

-- Instead of urinals in the bathrooms, the Gardens had long, metal troughs. I tried to pee once, standing arm to arm with a very short dude with a very tall afro. I’d never really seen a urine trough before, or for that matter, a black guy (I grew up in Georgetown which, to this day, is 99.9% white), so I was crippled by stage fright. I think I actually stood there for about five minutes before admitting defeat.

-- I used the ten dollars to buy a giant bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos and two large, flat Cokes.

Beyond this, the next thing I remember clearly is the ride home. I was hyper from the fight, chock-full of food, and as a kid in general I was prone to car-sickness. So of course, I barfed—all over the cousin’s knees. Everyone screamed, Frankie’s mom yanked the car over to the shoulder of the 401, and then there was dead silence. We all piled out of car and the cleaning began. What I couldn’t understand at the time was why everyone was so mad. I was used to puking around family, where the absolute first concern is always “are you okay, sweetie?” But my mom wasn’t there; outside of Frankie, these were practically strangers. And I didn’t handle the matter very well. I should have said something to the effect of, “Pardon me, everyone. If we could pull over to the safety of the shoulder, I would greatly appreciate it, as I’m afraid I might be ill.” What I actually said was, “HRAAAAAAGGGGGGGHAAAGHHHFFFFF!”

After they hosed me, the cousin, and the car down, they moved me from the back to the passenger’s seat, next to an open window. I don’t remember there being much conversation between that and when they dropped me off. I do know that I wasn’t invited to wrestling again.

Weeks later at my house, my brother’s friend Gaffey was over. He told us the story of a friend of his who’d gone to see wrestling, and we quickly figured out it was the same match I’d been to. “Oh,” Gaffey said. “And he told me that there was this kid with him who ate like a pig and didn’t really watch the match, and then puked all over him on the drive home. I mean just all over him.”

I raised my hand. “Yeah, that was me.”