Born In Baryards Poem by gershon hepner

Born in barnyards, see how roosters strut,
searching for a hen that is a slut.
Wherever men are born they do not care
about most women till they see them bare.
Their eyes that flash like moonshine look around
like roosters for a hen, and once they’ve found
a bird they like they do not need to beg,
and leave her long before she’s laid an egg.
Roosters in the morning crow in time
to wake their counterparts who’re with a hen,
ridiculous sometimes, sometimes sublime,
like roosters always, born as barnyard men.

Inspired by Dwight Garner’s review of “Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad Boy Wrestler Who Created Pop Culture, ” by John Capouya (“Perfumed, Coiffed and Grappling With Demons, ” NYT, September 19,2008) :
There’s a strange, funny moment in Bob Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One” — and oh please, let there be a Volume Two — in which he explains how a wink from Gorgeous George, the professional wrestler, changed his life.At the time Mr. Dylan was still Bobby Zimmerman, stuck in high school in Hibbing, Minn. He was performing on a makeshift stage in an armory lobby one day when, Mr. Dylan writes, Gorgeous George “roared in like the storm” for a match, his blond curls flowing, his “eyes flashing with moonshine.” The pair had a brief, flickering mind-meld. Gorgeous George threw the young musician a mighty wink and seemed to mouth the phrase, “You’re making it come alive.” That message, Mr. Dylan writes, “was all the recognition and encouragement I would need for years to come.” As musical creation myths go, this is not quite Robert Johnson and the Devil down at the crossroads. (Mr. Dylan’s Devil wore perfume, bobby pins, satin robes and tights.) But it’s terrifically, tantalizingly weird… Young Bobby Zimmerman wasn’t the only aspiring entertainer held rapt by Gorgeous George: Muhammad Ali, James Brown and John Waters have all cited him as a yea-saying inspiration. Gorgeous George himself, of course, had borrowed some of his moves from earlier bad-boy wrestlers and probably, Mr. Capouya suggests, from a generation of flamboyant black preachers. Mr. Capouya relates Gorgeous George’s story with enthusiasm and good cheer, but his franks-and-beans prose style will make some readers squirm. He’s the kind of writer who won’t use a word like “arena” if a phrase like “mat palace” or “biceps bin” or “bop hall” is handy. Chapters have groaner titles like “King Strut.” Mr. Capouya is better at straightforward narrative than social analysis; he strains to live up to his subtitle’s (wacky) contention that Gorgeous George “created” American pop culture. He’s not a lot better at putting this straight entertainer’s transgressive high jinks in context. Though he does write this: “In a sport in which two barely clothed and oiled men try to mount each other, there’s a bit of a homoerotic subtext.” Toward the end of his career the demons that had chased Gorgeous George caught up with and pummeled him. He became an alcoholic; he lost his looks; he had a “stripper period”; women claiming to have had children with him began climbing out of the woodwork. He died of a heart attack in 1963, at the age of 48, just two years after his retirement. Mr. Capouya charts how the crazy moonshine Bob Dylan saw in Gorgeous George’s eyes got there. But his heart doesn’t seem to be in the darker details, in the grease between the gears. He’s not a writer like Nick Tosches, whose biographies of somewhat similar performers (Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin) are neon-lit midnight rides. But “Gorgeous George” does leave the words of one long-ago sports reporter ringing in your ears: “Oh, my, what a strut. If only this man had been born in the barnyard. What a rooster he would have made.”


9/19/08