Story Time: Wrestling an Alligator

The thing about wrestling an alligator that it is relatively simple — not easy — simple.

Alligators are uncomplicated, you don’t ever wonder where you stand with an alligator — they have persisted through millions of years of evolution because they are beautifully-efficient killing machines.

As black belts in alligator wrestling, the Seminole people mastered the fine art of subduing these 500lb lizards in the swamps of south Florida — first for food, then later for sport and show when they were propped up as roadside attractions, routinely risking their lives to entertain white people.

The thing about arguing with a human is that it is incredibly complicated — not necessarily hard — but complicated.

Humans are messy, you generally never know where you stand with them — they have persisted through thousands of years of evolutions because they are grotesquely-complex thinking machines.

As a white belt in people arguing, I spent much of my youth touring around the country in a hard core punk band leveraging my progressive social and political views to convince small-town teenagers that my band was cool enough to buy a tee shirt from. It generally worked well enough to get us gas money between gigs, but occasionally it didn’t.

One summer night we found ourselves as the hired entertainment at a university of Gainesville sports bar — jerseys on the wall, no doors on the stalls — you know the kind of place.

It became immediately apparent that this wasn’t exactly going to be home run for us when, while we were loading one of the very few patrons assaulted the guitar player of the band we were on tour with — admittedly he was a grown man who went by the name Skeet Childress and was shirtless wearing pajama pants, a trench coat and an impotent mohawk.

The thing with alligators is, given their nature, controlling for all variables, if you chose to engage with one and you get bit — that’s on you.

As the hours past until our set time the crowd of three drunk frat guys at the bar swelled to five very drunk frat guys at the bar.

As you may have guessed, our particular brand of music and on-stage theatrics was not particularly accessible to the average bar patron — even within our narrow genre we were pretty esoteric.

We scorched through our first two songs without a seconds pause, but when we did stop it was chillingly silent until one clumsy voice hissed a pointed homophobic epithet.

Now it’s important to note that you don’t get this point in your musical career — headlining the third most popular sports bar in a college town in central Florida, thousands of miles from home without a few people calling you nasty names.

But for some reason that night, it was like the teeth sunk straight into the bone and I couldn’t shake it- no friends I decided that this was the night that I personally was going to end homophobia

Any alligator wrestler will tell you there are three clear courses of action should you run into one in the wild:

You can try to run

You can try to hide

or you can wrestle — but if you choose to wrestle, you have to be totally committed — a Seminole alligator wrestler can literally subdue a beast to the point where they can actually place their heads inside their massive jaws, but one wrong move, like your ear brushing against the top of the mouth, or breathes too heavy — that mouth snaps closed and he’s locked in for the death rolls.

Seconds pass and this guy pops off again, only this time I lock eyes with him, now at the time I’m 5.11.5 180 11% body fat — Im a damn specimen and instead of ignoring it I treat it like a solicitation, like “are you hitting on me right now?

My bandmates are clearly getting a little anxious — they didn’t sign up to fight any damn alligator. But he pops off again, and I respond, “Oh my god, how flattering your hitting on me.”

This had the predictable effect of escalating the situation which meant

A) It was working and

B) I clearly couldn’t stop now

At this point he’s shouting over the music and I don’t think I’m even trying to sing anymore, just aggressively flirting with this guy with every ounce of energy in my body. While my poor bandmates try desperately to ignore me.

But he wouldn’t back down which forced my hand to take the totally logical next step of performing an incredibly crude striptease maintaining eye contact with this guys the entire time until I was down to nothing but my underwear and woke entitlement.

When we hit the last note — I just stood there panting, PG-13 naked, dripping in sweat, locking eyes with this guy who was not only confused and horrified, but finally silent.

The thing about electing to wrestling an alligator — if it’s not part of your culture — is that you have to live with yourself afterwords.

Few things are more awkward than the conversation you have with a bouncer directly following a performance like that when they politely asking you to load out a little faster while you’re wearing nothing but your sweat drenched underwear because your gear is in the way of a Florida State game is being projected on the stage.